We Should Not Be Here
by murbell
Summary: America is a country as much defined by distance as it is culture. After circling the land for a bit, the road begins to take weird turns, and strange visions appear on the highway. Hunted by the creatures of terrible freedom, Alfred F. Jones and Feliciano Vargas are left to fend for themselves in the desolate land of distance. [AmeIta]
1. Chapter One: Breakfast at Midnight

_**Note:**_ **While this fanfic** ** _is_** **a crossover between** ** _Hetalia_** **and** ** _Alice Isn't Dead_** **, prior knowledge of anything from** ** _Alice Isn't Dead_** **is not required for the full enjoyment of this work, but do know that the plot of this work is heavily based off of the plot from** ** _Alice Isn't Dead._**

 ** _Disclaimer: Hetalia_** **belongs to Hidekaz Himaruya, and** ** _Alice Isn't Dead_** **belongs to Joseph Fink. I do not own either of the works.**

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In a good story, there's always a Beginning, a Middle, and an End. Feliciano Vargas was not quite sure where his own story started, nor when. But for lack of a better place to Begin it- he supposed he'd have to start with the breakfast at midnight.

He was sitting in a gas station. Well, no, it wasn't quite a gas station. It was a diner that was in a gas station. The diner part of the gas station. He was in that.

It was somewhere near the middle of nowhere.

He saw a man eating his food. But it wasn't the food. It was just the way he was eating the food. He was demolishing it, big chunks of yellow omelette and burnt slices of bacon scooped up with disgusting grease-stained fingers, just shoving them into his mouth.

And he was staring at Feliciano.

The man was wearing a white hat, a baseball hat. His fingernails were white too. Not nail polish white or pale white, but translucent white, just below the surface. White collared shirt. Dirty. Absolutely filthy, dirtier than you think a restaurant would allow someone to wear, would serve. Just the word "Tribulus" on the right breast. Feliciano had no clue what the word meant, but it sent flares of alarm racing up his spine.

But that man was moving food from plate to mouth like it had nothing to do with eating, like he was just a machine whose only function was to do that.

And he was still staring at Feliciano.

Feliciano had looked away, disturbed. Looked to the left, the right, down at his food, even checked behind him to find something to focus on besides the man, and he did. In fact, the subject of interest sat at the table right next to the man's.

Another man, but much brighter. Blond and glittering hair matched with tired but cheerful eyes the color of the ocean. He was dressed more neatly than the Tribulus man, thankfully. A pair of glasses sat on his nose, and a brown aviator jacket with a fur-lined collar rested over his shoulder. A plate stacked with donuts sat on the table in front of him, and he exuded contentedness.

He looked up, and Feliciano realized he was staring. Coughing lightly, he gave an embarrassed nod in response to the friendly (albeit awkward) smile and wave he received.

Looking away in haste, Feliciano found his eyes trapped once more by the Tribulus man.

People often told Feliciano that bad experiences were like nightmares. This wasn't a nightmare. What he remembered the most about it was how real it all was. Even as it happened, he noticed the most, how real it was, how he couldn't escape that reality. How he would never be able to convince himself that he had remembered any part of it incorrectly.

Big chunks of food. Chewing them. Demolishing them. He saw Feliciano staring back, and now they were staring at each other, something bubbling and monstrous there in that diner between them. The face of death in styrofoam ceiling tiles and sagging pleather booths.

He got up and approached Feliciano's table. His clothes were filthy, and he walked like his legs weren't muscle and bone, but just sacks of meat attached to his torso. He sat across from Feliciano in the booth and coughed. When he spoke, his voice sounded like the accidental hollowing of the wind.

"It's a fine evening," he said. "Doesn't look much like rain."

Egg crusted his lips and chin. His eyes bulged out of his skull and his mouth was twisted in an unnatural way. Nothing about what he was saying matched his tone at all.

At first Feliciano didn't say anything. He thought if he stayed quiet, the man would go away, but that only works with people who aren't already in it to bother you, who haven't already made up their minds to be awful.

"Hope you don't mind if I join you," the man said. Not a question, and not a request either. A joke.

Feliciano opened his mouth and responded with a voice wrought with terror and a lilting Italian accent. "I… I was actually hoping to eat alone," he said.

"Good people deserve good things," the Tribulus man said.

Feliciano didn't know what to say to that.

The man scratched his cheek, scratched it really hard, and Feliciano swore that some of it peeled away under his fingers.

"It's dangerous out here," he said.

"Out where?" Feliciano replied, voice starting to crack slightly. "This diner? This country? Life? Life is dangerous? Did you come over here to explain death to me?"

He laughed.

"Yes," he said. "I came over to explain death to you."

He leaned in close. His breath was rotten. Not bad rotten, Feliciano thought, but like fruit turning into soil.

"Want to see something funny?" he asked.

Feliciano trembled, and his eyes darted away to the other man. The man with eyes like the ocean. The man with the eyes like the ocean caught his stare immediately, and set his food down, shoulders tensing in alarm at what he saw.

The man in front of Feliciano got up. "Tribulus," his shirt said. His face was slack and not quite arranged right. Like human, but not. He walked over to a table where there was a man, a truck driver probably. Feliciano thought he looked like a truck driver.

What does a truck driver look like?

"Hey, Davie," the Tribulus man said.

"Huh?" said Davie, looking up. He seemed just as unhappy as Feliciano to be disturbed, but then the Tribulus man grabbed him by the back of his neck, and Davie's face went vacant. The Tribulus man picked Davie up by the neck, and Davie walked with him. He looked asleep, almost, or like some part of him wasn't there anymore.

Neither Davie nor the Tribulus man paid their checks. No one did anything, and no one looked.

Feliciano stared in horror as they left out the door, and he met the gaze of other one, the one with eyes like the ocean.

He stood up first, and Feliciano followed. They reached an agreement through a shared expression of fear and worry.

Out into the parking lot. He was waiting for them.

It was what he did next.

He was holding Davie now. Davie was awake again, but the Tribulus man was holding him too tightly for him to move.

The outside lights in the gas station weren't working anymore. The four men were shadows against the harsh light of the diner windows. Decent people eating waffles and shit ten feet away.

Feliciano trembled as he inched closer to the man with ocean eyes. Feliciano noticed that he was shaking too.

The embrace of the Tribulus man was almost tender, but there was nothing tender about him. His grip was strong, and the truck driver couldn't move, couldn't shout.

They both stared at Feliciano and the man with ocean eyes.

Davie's eyes were wide, struggling with a vision of the future without him in it. The longer Feliciano stared at the two, the more he realized that the originally white clothing the Tribulus man was wearing were less white, and more yellow, as if they were faded and had been collecting dust for decades. Even his nails seemed less translucent white, and more translucent yellow.

They both stared at Felciano and the man with ocean eyes.

And then the man with the yellow nails. He took a bite out of Davie. Tore out a chunk of flesh, right at the artery in his left armpit, and Davie began to bleed. He didn't move, but only whimpered a little. Tears started falling from his staring eyes, but he didn't move.

Feliciano didn't move either, and neither did the man with ocean eyes. It was like Fear had finally settled into its new home in the two, and was determined to keep them still in her bitter embrace.

The other thing, whatever it was, because it was not a man, dug his fingers into the wound and pulled out bits of Davie the way he had picked up the eggs, with the same flat movement, the nothing demeanor.

This was not a meal. This was not something he had to do in order to survive. It was a demonstration. The Tribulus man, he wanted Feliciano to know, or maybe he wanted the man with ocean eyes to know. And God, right then, they knew.

The man with ocean eyes grabbed Feliciano by the arm and ran out to the parking lot, towards a delivery truck. He helped Feliciano in, and Feliciano was too stunned and terrified to do anything but accept the help. He locked the doors, of course. Of course, he pulled out of the parking lot as fast as a truck that size would go… Which is not fast enough in a situation like that, of course.

Of course Feliciano cried. Of course he did.

Behind him in the mirror, he could still see the two figures. Could still see the distant shadow of Davie dying without a friendly face in sight. The only other people who could save him driving themselves away to safety, just the company of a monster to accompany him into his dissipation.

Feliciano couldn't see the details anymore. Those were in his memory.

All he could focus on was the man with the ocean eyes.

'I… Holy shit. Holy shit. What the fuck was that."

Feliciano shuddered. "I don't know. Dio mio, I don't want to know."

He could hear the unsteady breathing of the man with the ocean eyes. "Christ. What the hell… God. I, uh… I'm sorry I just dragged you in here with me. Your car is probably still back there, uh…"

"Feliciano," he managed to force out through shuddering breaths. "Feliciano Vargas. Please don't apologize, I… I don't want to think about what would've happened if you hadn't grabbed me then. Grazie…" Felciano trailed off, realizing he didn't know the name of the man with ocean eyes.

"Oh! Uh. Alfred F. Jones." Alfred grinned lopsidedly at Feliciano.

"Grazie, Alfred, a thousand times over," Feliciano murmured, eyes staring ahead at the road.

They fell into silence, and Feliciano shifted around a few times, trying to get comfortable. Under normal circumstances, he would be attempting to escape through the window.

But this wasn't a normal circumstance. He had just watched a man die, get eaten alive. Feliciano shifted his head to lean against the window.

"It's the engine, isn't it." Alfred commented.

Feliciano flicked his eyes over. "Hm?"

Alfred offered him an apologetic smile. "It takes a while to get used to sitting in the front of a truck. It's the engine, the sound of it. The noise of a truck this size, the height."

"Probably the height," Feliciano answered quietly.

Alfred laughed. "Yeah. That's what I think too. None of us are used to being this height anymore. A long time ago, we rode horses."

Feliciano gave Alfred an incredulous look. "We still ride horses now," he pointed out.

"You know what I mean!" Alfred smiled softly at the road. "The height. You'll get used to it eventually."

They lapsed into silence once more, and Feliciano watched the horizon line waver as the scenery changed. He thought about it, and he supposed that he would get used to the height, given he had enough time to adjust. He supposed that after what had happened that night, he wasn't going to be going anywhere by himself for a long time, and Alfred would be good enough company. They had gone through that grotesque performance together after all, and Alfred was the one who came to Feliciano's rescue. Feliciano figured that if he couldn't trust Alfred, he might as well throw himself off a cliff.

A sudden change in the horizon caught his eye. A tower in the distance, coming out of the hillside. Looks like it's part of a factory, but just… coming right out of the earth. Three points rose out of its shimmering black structure, and a sun, moon, and star rested on each of the three points.

"Creepy," Alfred said. "Gut creepy, like something gone wrong."

"Looks like something out of a myth," Feliciano said.

Alfred squinted at the tower as they drove closer to it. "You think that's where myths come from? When the real world looks like something out of a myth?"

Feliciano sighed. "Who are we at this point to talk about unreality? After… that."

"That's so weird." Alfred paused. "It doesn't look real."

Feliciano let out a small laugh and shook his head in amusement. "Alfred, I can't stop thinking about what's behind us."

Alfred hummed. "What, the stuff in the back? I think they've got me carrying travel-sized deodorant this time. Most deodorant can go on a plane, you don't need travel-sized versions. Not that many ounces even in full-sized ones. But anything that can hold a price a single human being will lay down for cash has to exist, and so here we are. My cargo in the back, the two of us mentally scarred people in the front. Hauling what didn't ever have to be from the place it didn't have to be made to the place where it doesn't have to be used."

Alfred wasn't getting distracted, or being dense. Feliciano could read enough of the atmosphere and mood to tell that the desperately cheerful man next to him was trying to avoid bringing up what had happened in the parking lot at all costs.

And because Feliciano happened to be a respectful human being, he did not pursue the subject any further. Instead, he closed his eyes, wished Alfred a good night, and fell asleep.

In the weeks that followed, the pair didn't dare leave each other's company, and for good reason.

Feliciano and Alfred both. They've seen the Tribulus man again. They've seen him again and again, behind the bathrooms at rest stops, in the snack aisle at gas stations, sitting alone in the biggest booths of the smallest roadside bars, places with one kind of beer on the menu and video poker in the bathroom by the toilet.

Something brutal and clumsy in his movements, like he didn't understand how any part of him worked.

Sharp teeth, Alfred mentioned quietly once. Not sharp enough to be fangs, but not human either. Definitely not human.

Yellow fingernails, Feliciano whispered to Alfred while in the truck another time. Not cigarette yellow or nail polish yellow. Translucent yellow, just below the surface.

He hadn't talked to either Alfred or Feliciano again, but they saw him, and he knew it. Feliciano knew that he wanted them to know that he was following them.

He didn't know who this… He refused to call him "man." He is not a man. Feliciano didn't know what he was, but he knew it was good reason for Alfred to keep on driving.

So now, here, the road between two places neither Feliciano nor Alfred had ever heard of. Travel-sized deodorant, an unusual height, closer to the night sky than to any other human being outside of their company. A night sky that seems gorgeous and heartbreaking, even though it's not. It's not anything. It just isn't.

Feliciano would keep thinking, and Alfred would keep driving. They would keep wandering the country, until they found whatever they didn't know they were looking for.

Hopefully, Feliciano prayed, they would do it before the Tribulus man got impatient.

Every time he looked around, he worried that the headlights he saw were the Tribulus man's, and his strange dirty hands are on the wheel, pointing them at Feliciano and Alfred, going faster and faster.

This better be worth whatever is happening, both Alfred and Feliciano decided one day.

After all, nothing ever could be.


	2. Chapter Two: Arthur and Charlatan

**Disclaimer: As mentioned in the previous chapter, Hetalia belongs to Hidekaz Himaruya, and Alice Isn't Dead belongs to Joseph Fink. I still do not own either of the works.  
**

 **While you don't need to know the story of "Alice isn't Dead," know that this is a Hetalia x Alice isn't Dead fanfic, and that the plot of this is heavily based on the plot of Alice isn't Dead.**

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Alfred noticed that once they went north of Salt Lake, the landscape started winding down real quick. It's all majestic mountains before that. As they moved down to the flats, it's like they forgot the grandeur ever existed.

He didn't think the landscape was that bad, really. It was just that… Anything's a letdown from the mountains.

Feliciano was slumped against the window, fast asleep. Alfred glanced at him momentarily and smiled grimly, before switching his gaze back to the empty road, losing himself in his thoughts.

He really thought Arthur was dead. Not all of the evidence was there, but it was true. Arthur really was dead. Alfred couldn't think of another reason he would vanish like that. Just _gone_. Just not Arthur next to Alfred in the mornings or coughing before bed. The adorably hostile front he put up, which was so easy to get behind.

He mourned Arthur. He didn't think he had ever loved someone so hard up to that point. From his god damn gut.

So screw you for that, Alfred thought to himself bitterly.

He went to groups. Alfred sat in circles and talked about Arthur, how much he loved him. That's what we do now, right? As a civilization, we sit in a circle and we describe the shape of the monster that is devouring us. We hope, like a talisman, that our description will provide some shelter against it.

It won't though, Alfred thought. We are helpless.

The circle was fine. It was good, actually. Alfred talked about Arthur, how he was always a little strange, almost always dressed in the completely buttoned navy blue collared shirt with a white trim and a white brooch of a penrose triangle.

And then, it was the news. A murder. Brutal, somewhere in the midwest. Not a city Alfred recognized. A city no one recognized except those that lived there. Somewhere in the heart of somewhere else.

And bystanders gawking, standing in a circle and trying to describe with just their faces the shape of the monster they had seen, trying to get a handle on it, trying to get by.

And there he was. Not Arthur, no. Alfred knew better than to hope he was still alive. Someone dressed the same as Arthur. Completely buttoned navy blue collared shirt with a white trim and a white brooch of a penrose triangle. Right among them looking like they knew exactly what was going on, like nothing was a surprise to them.

Nothing ever was a surprise to Arthur either, was it? Alfred pondered. He always did seem to know everything.

Alfred was never one to watch the news much, but when he saw it again- a different person, a woman, also dressed in a completely buttoned navy blue collared shirt with a white trim and a white brooch of a penrose triangle, looking like _she_ knew exactly what was going on, like nothing in _this_ brutal murder case was a surprise to _them_ either.

After that, Alfred tried not to miss a minute of it. Multiple channels of 24-hour news, it devoured him, and he started to see. A fire outside of Tacoma, a landslide in Thousand Oaks, a hostage situation in St. Joseph. Earnest folks speaking earnestly, describing only the bad parts of the world.

And in the background, someone dressed the same as Arthur. Just for a moment sometimes, or sometimes long and staring. Over and over, Alfred made a list of every place he saw an Arthur dress-alike on the news, and that became a map of America.

So, his boyfriend was probably part of a secret society before he died. That was good to know. That was new information.

Alfred stopped going to groups. He stopped sitting in a circle, started going, started moving, trying to understand, trying to get a grasp on the situation.

That's what he told himself anyways. Even now, Alfred knew he was still sitting in a circle. Just telling the story over and over again to himself, hoping that _someone_ would hear it and _someone_ would understand.

Hoping to ward off the monster by describing the shape of it.

Alfred quit his job. Walked right into his boss's office and told him that he didn't see a future between himself and prepaid debit cards. His boss didn't say much in return.

He started looking through Arthur's things. He had left them alone; didn't want to get tangled in the memories just yet. But now they weren't memories. They were evidence. Clues to a story Arthur had failed to tell him.

Again and again. On his laptop, on scraps of paper, on letters that he had hidden under piles of clothes, phrases Alfred couldn't understand, left behind by Arthur. "The California Project." "Vector H." "03/24" And, more than any other, "Bay & Creek Shipping." Over and over again Arthur had written about Bay & Creek Shipping.

Alfred didn't understand. Why? Why did this particular truck company interest Arthur so much? What was there left for him to find?

So he took a job. Bay & Creek Shipping. The went anywhere good businesses needed transportation services. Alfred had to go to school to learn how to drive trucks. It wasn't that bad once he got the hang of it. He supposed there were lots of people who do it, so it couldn't be that hard, right?

The job took him all over, even now, as he drove with Feliciano in the seat next to him.

A loyal employee of Bay & Creek Shipping, moving what is in one place to another, every mile a few cents. In his short time working for this company, he had seen things. Terrible things, every single one of them to do with the word "Tribulus".

Alfred didn't recognize the man at the diner that night. He hadn't noticed the "Tribulus" on his shirt, even when he gave him an uneasy nod after sitting down.

Davie was an example. "Tribulus" was a predator. Feliciano was an innocent.

Alfred didn't know what he was. He supposed that he was free.

Alfred sighed. He knew many different types of freedom.

People he knew talked about freedom the same way they talked about art, like it was a statement of quality rather than description. "Art" doesn't mean good or bad. Art just means art. It can be terrible and still be art.

Freedom can be good or bad too. There can be terrible freedom.

Alfred raked a hand through his hair in frustration. "You freed me," he whispered wistfully. "You freed me, Arthur, and I didn't ask you to. I didn't _want_ you to. I am more free now than I have ever been, and I am spiralling, I am spiralling across the country. Maybe your ghost is too."

As he drove towards a stoplight in a town, Feliciano yawned loudly and opened his eyes.

"Alfred?" He asked. "Were you talking to yourself? Where are we?"

Alfred blinked. "Uh…" He pointed at the sign by the stoplight. "Charlatan, I guess?"

"Oh." Feliciano wrinkled his nose. "Isn't that a weird name for a town?"

Laughing, Alfred answered, "Yeah. Sure is."

However, despite its name, Feliciano thought it was a nice enough town, and Alfred agreed. A breakfast and lunch restaurant called the Fairenfield, gas station (no name on the gas station), white Ford pickup truck at the pump, teenage girl pumping gas into it. Little neighborhood beyond that. Tract homes, well-kept yards. The Trade Winds Tiki Motel. A woman with what looks like probably her son, leaving room 204. She looked like she was scolding him, but in a loving way. An elderly man in a flannel shirt was crossing the crosswalk. He gave Alfred a long eye, but not in an unfriendly way.

Feliciano didn't think the world passed through there. He didn't think the world had been to this town in a long time.

As they left the town, Alfred spoke. "So, Feliciano. Tell me about yourself."

Feliciano stretched his arms above his head a bit and loosened the muscles in his shoulders. "Ah… Me? What do you want to know about me?"

"I dunno," Alfred hummed in thought. "How did you end up in America?"

Feliciano laughed lightly. "Ah, si! I used to live in Italy, obviously. I lived with my _fratello_ in the same house. We were happy and we did almost everything together. But then he decided he wanted to move to Spain with his boyfriend, and I decided that it would be too lonely to live in that house by myself." At this, Feliciano smiled softly, albeit a little bitterly. "It holds too many happy memories. So, I packed my things, took a suitcase full of clothes and necessities along with all the money I could, some paints, and ended up here."

Alfred perked up in interest. "Paints? You paint?"

"Yes!" Feliciano's lips turned upwards in excitement. "I love painting! I came to America mostly because I speak English well enough to survive here, but also because I wanted to paint some of the people and places around here!"

"Really?" Alfred grinned. "That's great!"

Feliciano smiled softly. "It's a shame that I no longer have my paints, or any of my supplies anymore. But I'll be fine."

Alfred was silent for a few moments before speaking up again, eyes still on the empty road ahead of them. "Tell you what. Feliciano, how about I buy you some pencils and a sketchbook from a Target or something?"

"Really?" Feliciano grinned widely. "I- That would be wonderful! _Grazie_ , Alfred!"

Alfred laughed, and so the two continued to chat. They talked about Feliciano's life in Italy, about his brother, the things he's done in his short time in America, and even just switched on the radio and tried to sing as loud as possible without swerving off the road.

Hours passed, and the good morale persisted. When they were a bit longer down the highway, to Boise almost, Alfred leaned forwards and squinted out at the sign at the side of the road.

"Okay, I know this sounds crazy," he began, "but aren't we at the same stoplight as the one in Charlatan?"

Feliciano frowned. "No, that's…" He trailed off, and his eyes widened in shock. "Impossible…?"

Charlatan. Fairenfield, Trade Winds Tiki Motel, everything was still there. But something had changed. It's darker now, obviously, later in the day edging into evening, but that's not it. There was still a white Ford pickup truck at the pump. It's covered in mud and dirt. Everything is covered in mud. Black silt on the windows of the restaurant, wet murk in the front yard of the homes, a swamp like a bog.

"What the hell happened?" Alfred whispered.

Feliciano had no answer. There was the teenaged girl, but she was turned away from them, her face pressed into the side of the truck. There's the elderly man on the corner, but he's not crossing. He's turned away from them too, face pressed into the pole of the streetlight. Room 204 of the motel, the woman and her son, faces pressed into the outside of the door.

Nobody was moving.

"I want this light to change," Alfred whispered.

Feliciano couldn't agree more. "The light is green. Let's get out of here."

Alfred put his foot on the gas hard.

There was a deep black mud splashing against the tires. It's running into the street.

Seconds filled with silence passed, and those seconds turned into minutes then an hour before either Alfred or Feliciano dared to speak again. Even when they finally are able to converse, the shock still sat with them.

"What…" Feliciano put his head in his hands.

Alfred exhaled deeply and shook his head in shock. "I have no idea."

North from Boise, the landscape started turning again, along with the mood. Trees popped up again, and with them, the conversation picked up again as well.

"Trees, thank God!" Alfred cheered, and Feliciano laughed and whooped along with him.

There are different types of desert, Feliciano knew. There is desert that is something - it's mesas or it's sand, and it had contours and its own spatial language - and then there's desert that just… isn't. Flatlands were the absence of everything else. Feliciano supposed that this, too, has its own spatial language, but… boy, he could understand how glad Alfred was to see trees again.

They laughed and joked together, the radio went back up, and they almost crashed the truck a few times. But, of course, it had to end.

Charlatan. _Again_.

"What the fuck." Alfred stared out at the scenery before him with a blank expression. He thought what he'd already seen in his time working for Bay & Creek Shipping was bad enough, but this was worse.

Charlatan again. It's hours and miles away, and again down the road. Alfred knew he wasn't going in circles. All the other town were passing the way they say on the map.

"Alfred," Feliciano called weakly. "Alfred, I… Look." He held up the map in his hands. "Charlatan isn't _on_ the map."

Alfred felt numb.

It was on fire. The whole city was on fire. The gas station, the Trade Winds Tiki Motel. It was an inferno, but he couldn't feel any heat, and he knew Feliciano didn't either.

"Feliciano, don't look." He sounded just as hollow as he felt.

Feliciano curled into a ball. "I wasn't going to. Please just tell me when we get out."

As he drove through the town for the third time, Alfred saw something burning at the gas station. He thought it might've been a person. He didn't want to think about which person it was.

Alfred choked. "Oh, _God!_ "

He heard Feliciano choke back a sob, but he couldn't help but feel helpless as well.

The elderly man was crossing the street. He was on _fire_. He turned, looked at Alfred, and his face was hollow and burning. What was underneath was exposed as his skin melted away. He opened his mouth and there was fire pouring out from within. His insides were _burning_.

"Oh my fucking God, I'm going, I'm driving, fuck this," Alfred slammed his foot on the gas pedal and struggled not to cry as he and Feliciano left Charlatan behind for the third time.

This time, there was no recovering from the silence. Feliciano sobbed into his hands and Alfred struggled with the vision of the elderly man burning, now singed into his memory, as he gently rubbed Feliciano's back.

Neither of them spoke a word in the hours that elapsed, in which they knew would end with Charlatan, again.

Everything was back to the way it was before. Everything was clean and new. Customers in the Fairenfield eating pancakes, the teenage girl filling her truck up at the gas station. She was crying. She looked at Alfred and Feliciano furtively, and she was crying.

Everyone was crying. The woman and her son are leaving room 204 at the Trade Winds Tiki Motel; they were both crying. Alfred knew that behind every window on every one of the little tract homes with their neat yards, there was someone watching him and Feliciano and crying.

Alfred narrowed his eyes. "Where's the elderly ma-"

He caught his breath, and Feliciano froze completely.

The elderly man was situated in the space between Alfred and Feliciano's seats.

Neither Alfred nor Feliciano dared to breathe.

He was also crying. His face was eroded by tears, by what looks like decades of weeping. He did not say anything.

"What do you want?" Alfred whispered.

The elderly man was raising his hand. He gestured toward the road out of town. He nodded.

Alfred let his foot off the break, and Feliciano let his breath out.

"We're leaving Charlatan," Feliciano whispered.

The man was gone. In the mirror, Alfred saw him crossing the crosswalk.

"Yeah." Alfred repeated. "We're leaving Charlatan behind."

Alfred had no idea what that meant. All he knew was that its meaning did not include him, and that he was not necessary to it.


	3. Chapter Three: Nothing to See

**Disclaimer: Hetalia still belongs to Hidekaz Himaruya, and Alice Isn't Dead still belongs to Joseph Fink. I do not own either of the works, because I unfortunately lack the creativity and originality and skill required to create either.**

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"Alfred," Feliciano whined, "At least tell me what _state_ we're in!"

Alfred grinned. "Well, we're not _not_ in Kansas anymore."

Feliciano sighed and Alfred laughed. "I swear," Feliciano mumbled, "After so long of dealing with you, you'd think I'd be used to your miserable excuses for jokes at this point."

"Excuse you!" Alfred stuck his nose in the air. "My jokes are wonderful!"

Laughing, Feliciano rolled his eyes. "No they aren't! You tell what you Americans call 'Dad Jokes'!"

Alfred gasped in mock offense. "How _dare_ you insult me like th-"

He cut himself off and his eyes widened.

Feliciano stopped laughing as well and watched him intently. "What's wrong?"

When Alfred didn't respond, Feliciano tried again. "Alfred? What's wro-"

"Hush!" Alfred glanced backwards into the trailer with frantic eyes. "What- Did you hear that? What the hell _was_ that?"

Feliciano knit his eyebrows in worry. "I didn't hear anything."

"I swear to God something just moved in the trailer. I can hear it from here, it has to be something big." Alfred muttered to himself frantically as he pulled the truck over to the side of the road. "Something just shifted in the trailer… What the hell _was…_ "

Feliciano watched with wide eyes as Alfred unfastened his seat belt and opened the door. "Can you pass me the flashlight?"

"Uh- Yeah!" Feliciano scrambled to grab the small flashlight off the ground and handed it to Alfred. "Here!"

Alfred grimaced. "Thanks but… Mind grabbing the heavier one for me? I want to have something to use as a weapon in case… In case it's _him_."

Feliciano paled dramatically and nodded. He dug around the small drawer-like space in the front of the truck for a while before procuring the larger flashlight, heavy as a club. As he hands the flashlight to Alfred, his hands shook in fear.

Alfred took the flashlight and was about to move away, when Feliciano grabbed him by the wrist. "No, wait, Alfred, listen," his voice was shaky, and Alfred felt his heart squeeze slightly at the sight of Feliciano's panicked expression. "Alfred, listen, you have to come back, alright? Or, no, if coming back means you'll die, don't. Run if you have to, avoid fighting if it _is_ him, and please just stay alive."

Alfred took Feliciano's trembling hands gently into his own and nodded grimly. "I promise."

And then the car door closed, and he was gone.

Alfred walked around and opened up the back. Boxes of, what he thought was probably paper napkins, or rolls of paper towels greeted him. Shadows between the boxes, lots of places to hide. But there's no one else to take over when Alfred got scared, so he grabbed the heavy flashlight, heavy like a club, and went right in. Pulled himself up and went through every inch of the trailer. Just boxes of paper whatevers, nothing else.

He figured he was just imagining the noise. Or perhaps, he had hit something on the road and it bounced off the bottom. Who knows?

Alfred closed it back up and got back into the front.

He gave Feliciano a reassuring smile, but kept a hold on the flashlight. And they talked.

Kansas looked exactly like Feliciano and Alfred had thought it would. There was something satisfying about that for them. Grass forever, occasionally a metal windmill right out the Wizard of Oz ("There were metal windmills in that, right?" Alfred had asked. " _Scusa_ , but it's been years since I've last seen it, so I have no idea") strip malls, of course, but that's everywhere… nothing to see, no matter where they looked. There was a relief in that.

Alfred swore loudly. "I swear I heard it again! How can I hear it so loudly and clearly?"

Feliciano looked more alarmed this time. "Alfred, are you sure you're not just tired? We can pull into a parking lot and rest for tonight if you need some sleep."

"No, I _swear_ there's someone pacing in my damn trailer," Alfred pushed his hair back and exhaled heavily. "I know there isn't, but I also know there is. I can hear the footsteps so clearly, like someone walking in the hallway of my house when no one else was supposed to be home. I swear to God I know I hear it."

Feliciano nodded warily. "Alright then…. Just… Take the flashlight with you, alright?"

"Wasn't planning on going without it anyways."

After a few moments, Alfred returned, more infuriated than ever. "Nothing again! Boxes and darkness and empty corners, but I _know_ I'm not imagining anything. I heard those noises loud as life! Damn it!"

Feliciano sighed and pat Alfred on the shoulder gently. "Even if I can't hear the noises, Alfred, I believe you. Given what we've gone through so far, in such a short amount of time…" Feliciano's eyes were exhausted and world weary. "I don't think anything is impossible anymore."

Alfred smiled bitterly. "Thanks."

Feliciano smiled right back. "No problem. Let's hurry up and find a parking lot in some town or something where we can sleep for tonight though."

Taking a deep breath, Alfred sat back up straight. "Yeah. Let's."

And so he started up the engine again and began to drive. They passed through town after town.

Some of the towns were so small. A few houses, a bingo hall, a church, and a huge adult store. They were very open about their adult stores out there. Big billboards, huge barn-like structures, packed parking lots in the middle of the day… And across the way, the churches. Two gathering places to services all your needs, and the bingo hall for recreation. It wasn't a bad setup, Feliciano supposed. Every axis of life, and beyond that, grass on and on, until not.

 _Dio mio_ , am I being condescending? He thought to himself. I am, aren't I? _Merda_.

Next to him, Alfred got more and more agitated.

Another sound. There was someone in his trailer, and he knew it. He could hear them moving. Shifting boxes around. Heavy boots on the floor-

Who was back there? And _why_ weren't they back there when he actually stopped to look?

"I'm not gonna stop this time," Alfred hissed to himself quietly. "I'm gonna keep on driving. There's no way from there to here anyways. Even if someone _was_ in there, no way for them to get out of there and into my cab. I'm fine. I'm okay. I'm fine. I'm fine."

 _I'm fine._

It was getting dark. And when it got dark, over the grass, it _really_ got dark. Like being on an ocean. The distant lights of towns out there, like ships. There was only a last lingering orange on the horizon, and it was just them on the road.

The movement and footsteps continued. It was like they were trying to provoke Alfred, get him to stop and look again, but he wouldn't fall for it. He' keep driving until… He didn't know. He'd have to stop driving eventually, and he got the feeling that the next time he checked, he wouldn't see nothing. He thought that the chances were, he would finally see.

Alfred was scared. He was scared, and he said so out loud, admitted it to Feliciano.

"Don't tell our friend in the back though," he joked weakly.

The only response Feliciano gave was a sympathetic and worried smile, along with a hesitant pat and squeeze on the shoulder.

Heavy boots on the trailer floor.

I don't hear it, Alfred thought furiously to himself. I don't hear it!

 _I do_.

He took a deep breath and looked around. Alfred pulled off into the parking lot of a Target. He would distract himself instead.

Feliciano looked over at Alfred. "Are we stopping for tonight?"

Alfred smiled as sweetly as he possibly could. "Yeah. But let's go inside first. I _did_ promise you that notebook and sketch pencils, remember?"

Feliciano grinned and laughed in delight. "I thought you were joking, to be honest!"

"Well, I wasn't, and we're here, so let's go!" Both Alfred and Feliciano unbuckled their seat belts and exited the truck. After making sure everything was locked properly, Alfred walked away from the truck, and towards the Target store.

"Oh, wait!" Feliciano smiled apologetically at Alfred. "I left something important on the truck. Mind if I borrow the keys really quickly?"

Alfred nodded and tossed him the keys, before heading back towards the Target. "Go for it, but catch up with me, alright? I need to take a piss."

"Alright!" Feliciano called. He watched as Alfred disappeared into the store.

Feliciano turned and faced the truck. With a press of a button, he unlocked the door, and took out from under Alfred's seat, the flashlight, heavy as a club. Feliciano figured that if nothing else, he'd have the protection of crowds, of the public, here in the Target parking lot. If nothing else, the lights. They would keep him calm.

Turning to the back of the trailer, he took a deep breath and unlocked the door and opened it, and there was no need to look around, no searching, because there he was, the source of the noise.

The Tribulus man, from the gas station a couple months ago. Yellowed baseball hat, yellowed fingernails, skin that didn't fit right, that stretched in grotesque ways over a skeleton that didn't seem human, sharp teeth - not sharp enough to be fangs, but not _not_ fangs - eyes that were yellow and pink right to the dark center of them. Polo shirt, dirty, _filthy,_ just the word "Tribulus" on the right breast.

"You miss me?" he asked. He sounded like he was having fun.

The boxes in the back had been torn into shreds, like they'd been attacked by a huge cat. Giant claw marks. He hopped down onto the asphalt and Feliciano backed up, breath already beginning to come in short gasps. Suddenly, crowds didn't feel like much protection.

He smelled like decay. Not bad, but like fruit decomposing into soil, like mulch.

"Where do you think you're going?" he said. "I mean, where would you even go that I couldn't follow? Don't you know who I work for?" He indicated the "Tribulus" on his pit-stained shirt. He was sweating a thick pungent mildew.

"Th-There are people all over this parking lot! Hundreds of th-them," Feliciano stammered. The same high-strung and much more heavily accented voice from that night months ago came back out. He was exaggerating, and he was terrified. It was a Target parking lot, yes, but it was also very late and in the middle of nowhere. There were cars, yes, and people, yes, they were there, but not in great numbers. Certainly not hundreds. Still enough, Feliciano hoped. Enough.

He laughed.

"People?" he asked. " _People_ won't help you. There's not a person in this world who can help you."

Feliciano's entire body trembled. "I-I have Alfr-fred!"

He laughed again. "I said 'can', not 'would.'"

 _Is he right?_ Feliciano wondered. _Is there not a person in this world who can help me?_

God, he hoped not.

He took Feliciano's arm. He didn't know how he got that close, but the Tribulus man was there. And he did not grab, he _took_ , like a dance partner. Gentle but insistent. And then he pushed Feliciano up against the truck. The smell was overpowering. Up close, his skin writhed like there were insects crawling back and forth just under it. His teeth were rotten. His tongue was swollen and covered in a white film.

He had Feliciano. That was all there was to it. His arm was against Feliciano's throat and he was pushing just enough to let him know that he could do it, but not enough to cut off air. Feliciano drew and released frightened breaths against the weight of him. He kicked for the crotch, of course, but it was like the Tribulus man felt nothing. And then Feliciano just flailed at him. He still had the flashlight in his hand, heavy as a club, and though his swing was restricted, he gave the Tribulus man a few good ones. His body dented with the blows, but he didn't stop smiling. Didn't even grunt. Pushed just a little harder on Feliciano's throat.

The flashlight, heavy as a club, dropped out of Feliciano's hand and rolled uselessly away, and now his breath was truly shallow because of the pressure.

He said, "I could take a big bite out of you right now and it would be over. I could _devour_ you. And then, what would become of your precious little Alfred?"

Feliciano went limp against the truck. He gave up then. He shouldn't have, but he was out of energy. He had tried so hard, had made a friend in the United States of America, and now _this monster!_

And then… And then Feliciano didn't give up. He gathered himself. _Fuck_ the Tribulus man! Feliciano kicked and screamed and used every bit of energy and movement he had. He wouldn't go down quiet. He could see people all over the parking lot turning and looking. Even if Feliciano couldn't fight him, he could get the people to look, get them to see.

A family - a father and two kids - and the kids were pointing, and the father was on his phone, and he was talking urgently and gesturing towards Feliciano.

And Alfred, oh God, _Alfred_ , came charging out of the store and running up to Feliciano and tried to drag the Tribulus man off of him, and Feliciano fought, and so did Alfred, and the Tribulus man just _stood_ there, smiling, but still they fought, right up until the siren, right up until…

The police car pulled up. The policeman got out. No partner; he was alone. Big man. Not big as in muscular or big as in fat, just… _big_. Towering.

The Tribulus man let Feliciano go. He stumbled a few paces away and fell into Alfred's chest, sobbing and gasping for breath. The policeman walked over, but he didn't seem in a hurry, didn't seem worried about the Tribulus man, or that he had just been attacking Feliciano.

"What seems to be the problem here?" he said, sounding bored.

Alfred exploded. " _What seems to be the problem?!_ " In quick raging sentences and furious gestures, he told the policeman about the noises, the stopping, and how the Tribulus man was obviously _attacking_ Feliciano. Feliciano continued to sob into Alfred's chest, and Alfred smoothed circles on his back reassuringly.

The policeman frowned. Didn't meet Alfred's or Feliciano's eyes.

"Is that true?" he said to the Tribulus man, who hadn't moved, hadn't interrupted, had leaned with crossed arms on the truck.

The Tribulus man just laughed.

"Doesn't _sound_ like it's true," said the policeman.

Feliciano didn't know what to do. On either side of him, the policeman and the Tribulus man. Not a person in the world who would help him. Right by his side and comforting him while struggling not to rage at the policeman and unable to defeat the Tribulus man, Alfred. Not a person in the world who could help him.

The policeman said, "If he has to come talk to you, then you've been asking the wrong questions." He lumbered back over to his squad car, opened the door. "My advice," he said, "is stop asking the wrong questions."

He tipped his hat at the Tribulus man. "You have a nice night, now."

The Tribulus man did a lazy wave in return. "I will, officer," he said. "You _know_ I will."

And the police car drove away.

The Tribulus man made no move to attack again. The message had been delivered to Feliciano, who was sure to relay it to Alfred.

"You see now?" he said, speaking not only to Feliciano, but also to Alfred. "So go home. Listen," he seemed suddenly concerned, worried for Feliciano, even. "You can still go home. Go back and forget any of this ever happened."

Feliciano felt Alfred's arms tense up and fists ball up. Immediately, he placed a hand on his chest. "Alfred, _no_ ," he hissed through his hiccups.

Then the wolf grin returned, any trace of human emotion gone from him. And he turned and walked away into the night. To the lit edges of the Target parking lot, and into the thin landscaped border, and the vacant grassland beyond.

And Feliciano and Alfred, they're alive. They were back on the road, and they were alive.

Feliciano told Alfred everything the Tribulus man had told him, and Alfred was livid. The Tribulus man was wrong, he decided. Alfred couldn't go home. Home wasn't a place, home was a person, and that person was _gone_.

A police car had been following them for the last ten miles. No siren, no light, but staying close on their tail. They attracted their attention.

"The Tribulus man is working with them," Alfred muttered.

"Yeah," Feliciano agreed quietly.

Alfred laughed drily. "Listen to us. We sound crazy. Or the world does. The _world_ sounds crazy."

Feliciano smiled bitterly. "We made enemies today. Things are going to be even more difficult from now on, aren't they."

Alfred nodded. "Yeah. Yeah."

There was noise again in the trailer. Roaring and shifting, like an enormous angry animal. Both Alfred and Feliciano heard it, but neither reacted.

Feliciano decided he wasn't going to give up. Alfred decided he couldn't go home. They both decided that could only go on. And on, and on, and on, until not.

The noises stopped after thirty minutes. The police car turned off the highway. They were let off with a warning.

And it was a warning that they were going to ignore.


	4. Chapter Four: The Factory by the Sea

**Disclaimer: Google Hetalia. It belongs to Hidekaz Himaruya. Google Alice Isn't Dead. It belongs to Joseph Fink. My name does not come up when either of these are Googled.**

 **SHOUTOUT TO** **Anime4life5 FOR GIVING THIS STORY ITS FIRST REVIEW: YOU ARE GREATLY APPRECIATED!**

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The sea was crystalline. It's seductive. But the land felt angry and lost. There was no harmony there. The tranquility of the lapping waves sputtered out and the land slumped into place. Bugs swarmed the air.

"God damn it!" Feliciano laughed lightly at Alfred's sudden swear. He switched the windshield wipers on to remove the messy death of a huge bug.

Feliciano hummed as he checked the map. Delivery today was to a factory. He didn't recognize the name of the company, but the factory was vast. It was right on the beach. A huge block rectangle of metal pipes and tanks and three lowering stacks, black smoke out over the water. One side of the building went into the high tide line, water just lapping up against the concrete foundation, the gentle white slope of the sand on either side. Feliciano furrowed his brow.

"Why would anyone build a factory like that?" he murmured to himself. "Isn't that an environmental hazard?"

Alfred shrugged. "No idea."

He didn't see any other way out to the loading deck, so he just drove right on the sand backed up to it. There was a young man there. Very young - seventeen, at the most. Probably less. The kid was wearing a gray factory jumpsuit with the company's logo on it in red. The logo was a dog cringing in pain, and Alfred flinched slightly at the image. "Praxis Industries."

"Hi," the kid on the loading dock said. "Hi, my name's Roma! You got my delivery?"

"Sure," Alfred said, "right in the back."

It wasn't much. Feliciano wasn't sure why they needed a truck of that size to deliver it, and Alfred didn't question it. Stray bits of wood, each individually labeled with a number and a letter. Neither could tell much from the shape of them.

"Cool, cool," the kid said. "This is perfect. Hey, you two help me with this, would you?"

Together all three of them took them off the truck, and put them piece by piece on a conveyor belt, which carried them through a chute into the factory. Black smoke out over the water, churning machines…

Feliciano didn't see a single human being on the scaffolding. No one having a cigarette out on the loading dock, not a face in any of the grease-smeared windows, no worker in sight. No parking lot, either. Just the beach.

"Come on in, I have to sign off on the delivery inside," said Roma. He disappeared through a propped-open fire exit. Alfred and Feliciano exchanged looks, and followed right after, but he was already gone.

Inside the factory, the air didn't feel like air to Feliciano, but more like some… Artificial replication. It felt hot and tight in his lungs. The hallway was the wrong shade of green, if that made any sense. The green that isn't right, that's off from what it should be? It was that green.

Bare bulbs, doors leading off from the hallway, all locked. Feliciano tried each of them. He walked down the long, long hall with Alfred. No sign of Roma. Alfred seemed unnerved as well.

The hallway ended at a glass door. They pushed through, and they were in some kind of manager's office. Cheap binders, red and blue, overstuffed with paper, and an IKEA desk with a computer still running Windows XP.

There was a man there in the same gray jumpsuit. On the wall was the logo of the company. It was someone drowning, gasping for air, and Alfred flinched away from it. It said "Praxis Industries."

"Hello?" Feliciano said to the man in the jumpsuit.

"Oh, sure, sorry," He said. "Just have to get the paperwork settled."

It was Roma, but older, Feliciano realized. A quick glance at Alfred showed that he had come to the same conclusion. They didn't know how much older, but at least in his early thirties. His hair had already started to grey a bit. He didn't have wrinkles, exactly, but he had the places in his face where the winkles would be.

Alfred didn't know what to do. He pinched and pinched, but every time it hurt. Feliciano put a hand on his back and nudged him forward gently, offering a soft smile. So, Alfred did the only thing he could do. He picked up the uncapped Bic pen on the desk and signed the forms where Roma was pointing.

"Ahh, sure, thanks," he said. "Listen, I hate to be a bother, but could you just give me a quick hand with unpacking in the next room? No problem if not, but it's a bit of a pain on my own."

Alfred didn't say anything, so Feliciano nodded. It was all he could do.

"Yeah," he said. "Sure."

"Great!" Roma said, and he bustled off through the double doors.

Feliciano had some idea of what would happen. He gently took Alfred by the arm and pushed through the doors. No sign of Roma, of course. It was the factory floor, a great arc of a roof with skylights over towering machines, automatic processes that Feliciano couldn't understand, and _no workers at all_. Metal hands building metal things, and no human beings in sight.

"Alfred," Feliciano said gently as they walked. "Alfred, _mio amico_ , are you alright?"

Alfred coughed awkwardly and nodded his head, but made no move to remove his arm from the link it was in with Feliciano's. "Yeah. Yeah, I'm alright. Let's… Let's go find Roma."

They wandered down the concrete aisles, the sound of the machines pounding in their teeth and eyelids. Machine after machine. Imagine the scale of them. Picture it.

And then, Roma again. He was older, in his late fifties or early sixties, and the promise of his wrinkles made good. Some scars that certainly weren't there before laced a few spots on his arms. Alfred felt dizzy and sick, the thrum of the machines became a hum in his gut, and he tasted hot metal.

"Great," Roma said. "You made it!"

He was piecing the wooden sections together, fitting them into some sort of structure. Feliciano still couldn't tell what it was.

"Roma?" Alfred asked. "What is going on here?"

"Roma," he said. "Hah! No one's called me 'Roma' in a long, long time. Caesar. I prefer Caesar. Leave the younger man's name to the younger man."

The howl of the machines echoed back from the empty scaffolding and walkways, and onto Caesar, older and stooped. He gestured at what he needed and Feliciano and Alfred helped him fit some of the wood bits into other wood bits, following his instructions and not their own understanding.

Neither Alfred nor Feliciano said anything more.

Once they had finished doing whatever they were doing, it didn't look like much. A cube, but missing some bits, maybe. He pressed a button and the whole thing rolled on the conveyor belt through the tunnel of machines and out the factory. Caesar gave Feliciano a thin, sad smile.

"Only one more stop now," he said. "Come on, then, kid."

He stooped his way out of the building, and Feliciano and Alfred followed him. Of course they did.

Outside the door, a narrow concrete ledge over the water. Blue water, white sand. The light slapping of the ocean against the factory, wearing it away one gentle touch at a time.

Caesar was there. Already so old. His hair was pure white, and his eyes were clouded. Scars ran up and down what skin was visible, and even his face was marked. He was easily seventy, probably eighty. Maybe more.

"Well, this is it, then," he said. "Help me with these last few pieces."

And they helped him with those last few pieces, and as they locked into place, Feliciano understood, and Alfred shortly afterwards. And when Caesar gestured, they didn't ask questions. They helped him carry the coffin they had built to the edge of the factory, and dropped it into the water. When the tired old man who used to be an energetic child reached for Alfred's hand, Alfred didn't hesitate. He eased Caesar into the coffin as it floated. He nodded.

He didn't seem scared. Alfred's hands shook, but his were steady. Feliciano stood by with a solemn expression.

"Just push me out, then," he said.

The coffin bobbed in the water. He laid his head back, and he put his eyes up to the sky.

On the inside of the coffin lid was the company's logo in red. The logo was two people lowering a coffin into the sea. "Praxis Industries," it said. Alfred didn't flinch.

And God help them, Alfred and Feliciano pushed. The coffin took off into the tide, and with each wave it was a little farther out. Caesar's hands were so small, so frail, and they reached up and pulled the lid closed. They stood there watching as it went out further, and further, and then was gone.

The factory kept on churning, machines make machines. There was no one in sight. It smelled like the sea, and it smelled like smoke and steel and it smelled like algae and murk.

Once he was gone, and Feliciano felt himself start to breathe again, Alfred stepped off the edge, waist-deep into the water, and Feliciano followed. Their bodies trembled, and their hands found each other, and in doing so, found comfort. They walked through the water around the factory, and onto the sand, white as bone, white as heat, and got into the truck, wet as they were, dripping onto the torn plastic seats, dripping on the books stacked on the floor, curling the pages, hands still clasped together tightly. Alfred put his other hand on the key, turned the engine back on, and drove away. Away from the sand, away from the factory, out back onto the road.

Away from the factory.

And they cried. It seemed like all they did ever since meeting each other was cry, tremble, and fear, but at least they had each other for comfort.

They were driving away, away from the factory, and their feet were wet and their hands were sweaty. They would try to forget what they saw there, but they wouldn't be able to. They would never forget what happened at the factory by the sea.

The farther south they went on the coast, the worse the drivers got. They were old, and they were mad. Why were they so mad?

"Why are you in my lane?" Alfred muttered. " _Why are you in my lane?!_ " He yelled out the window. Feliciano laughed at his rage and the old man who was _in his lane_ flipped him off, but ultimately got out of his lane.

Feliciano flipped the radio onto a random station with his right hand and hummed along.

There was a black van parked by the side of the road. Man outside of it, sitting in a lawn chair, he had coolers next to him, sign saying "50¢ clams, $2 crabs."

"Hmm… tempting," Alfred commented, eyes following the van. "But we're not gonna stop."

Then the popcorn store came up. An entire store of popcorn. "Even more tempting," Feliciano echoed. "We're not gonna stop for that either though."

The suburbs never bended there. Firework outlets, outlets that sell only uniforms of various kinds, churches like they build when they have no history, strip mall triangles, same architecture as the Taco Bell - easily convertible into a Ross Dress for Less if the church didn't work out.

Feliciano supposed he shouldn't judge. No one should. Everyone did things they shouldn't, though.

"I've been thinking about the pizza nights I used to have with my boyfriend," Alfred said suddenly. The hand holding Alfred's suddenly felt a bit uncomfortable, but Alfred wouldn't let go. "Dough from scratch, sauce from scratch, cheese from the store. Not going that far."

Feliciano laughed a bit at that.

"Making the bread was great. Dough for the crust, flour and water in my hands, first separate and then merging into a whole thing. The yeast and gluten almost making it seem alive, and how it moves when you poke it. It breathed into my hands, I swear." Feliciano smiled. "Arthur's hands and my hands covered in flour, and we'd open a bottle of wine, and we'd eat the pizza we made, and… we'd just watch whatever's on TV and fall asleep in a bread and wine coma, assuming he didn't get drunk."

"Yeah?" Feliciano looked out the window to his right. "Where's… Arthur? How come you don't still live with him?"

Alfred laughed, but it wasn't particularly bitter. Nostalgic, maybe, filled with a little sorrow, but no regret. "He's dead. Probably. Just vanished one day and never came back."

Feliciano's eyes widened. " _Mio Dio,_ I'm so sorry! I didn't mean to-"

"No, no!" Alfred laughed some more, and it was light hearted. "No, don't worry about it. I wanted to talk about it, which is why I brought it up in the first place."

Feliciano coughed lightly in embarrassment. "Ah, yes. I- I see."

Alfred smiled out at the road. "He worked as an accountant, but almost always wore this one blue collared shirt with white trim around the collar, and almost always had this weird-ass white penrose brooch on him."

Feliciano's eyes widened and he turned to look at Alfred, sitting there in his navy blue collared shirt with white trim around the collar, with a white penrose brooch. "You mean-"

"Yeah." Alfred smiled. "He worked for this company too. I had no idea, until he was dead, and I started to notice people dressed just like this on the news. I looked through his things, found a ton of crap with 'Bay & Creek Shipping' scrawled all over it. So here I am."

"Wow." Feliciano didn't know what else to say. The music on the radio station stopped, and ads began playing. He frowned and switched the station.

Alfred grinned as familiar words danced out of the speakers. Feliciano laughed. Even if he wasn't American, he knew this song well.

" _What is love? Baby don't hurt me! Baby don't hurt me! No more!_ "

The keyboard riff began to play, and Feliciano and Alfred laughed together as they sang along.

" _Oh, I don't know why you're not there, I give you my love, but you don't care!"_

" _So what is right and what is wrong? Gimme a sign!"_

" _What is love? Baby, don't hurt me! Don't hurt me! No more!"_

" _What is love? Baby, don't hurt me! Don't hurt me! No more!"_

As they continued to sing, the sun began to slowly inch its way down towards the horizon. In the five minutes and thirty seconds that it took them to sing the whole song, the sky had gotten significantly darker.

Alfred smiled softly into the night.

"I think love is cooking together," he began. "I think it's making something with each other, that's what I think."

Feliciano smiled as well. "Yeah?"

"Yeah. Flour on our hands, sauce on our hands, our hands on our hands, something forgettable on the TV, leg upon leg. That was the life." Alfred laughed. "I wonder if we'll ever do that."

Feliciano's smile widened. "I hope so, Alfred."

"You know," Alfred began again. "Ever since we met each other I don't think we've known anything for certain."

Feliciano grinned. "Well, I mean, there's a Denny's in two miles."

"Yeah," Alfred laughed. "There's that, Feliciano. There's always that."


	5. Chapter Five: Warning Signs

**Disclaimer: If I owned Hetalia or Alice Isn't Dead I wouldn't be writing fanfiction, I would be satisfied with my life and having a vacation. But I'm here. So using context clues, what does that tell you? I don't own either Hetalia or Alice Isn't Dead.**

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"You know what I love more than anything else?" Alfred said to the now asleep Feliciano. "Cruise control. I love cruise control more than most of my family members. And sorry to all aunts and uncles and cousins, you are great people. That cramp in my ankle from holding the gas pedal at the angle _just so_ is literal Satan. And cruise control is the host of Heaven punching him in the face. It is the kind word in a strange country, the rain after a drought."

He had to stop talking for a bit at this point, and squinted out at the side of the road.

"Did that billboard have the word 'fart' on it?" Alfred laughed. "I probably just misread it."

Thank God for cruise control.

Some of those billboards, it wasn't even clear what they were supposed to be advertising. One that Alfred had just passed said "HUNGRY?" and nothing else. All capitals and question mark. Black test, white background. Was it just advertising the _idea_ of food? The _concept_ of consumption? If so, Alfred was in. He was all in, but… who paid for that, and _why_?

It was a long way from Florida to Atlanta, so it was no surprise Feliciano fell asleep. It was also a desolate way.

The landscape was constructed of billboards. There were no natural features, but the side of the road was a constant chatter, a one-sided conversation. Lots of anti-evolution stuff.

All the trucks stops being advertised had names like _The Jade Palace_ or _The Chinese Fan_. Real racist fonts too. Oh, and all of them with pictures of scantily-clad women and stuff about massages.

Alfred thought that this had to be the grossest stretch of road he had ever driven.

"Lord, get me to Atlanta," he muttered under his breath.

Alfred had been going through Arthur's laptop. One of the only things he took with him when he left. That, and a stack of books he hadn't even bothered looking through.

Was going through Arthur's laptop an invasion of privacy? Alfred didn't know. It wasn't an invasion of privacy to go through his dead boyfriend's records, right? That's just being organized. That's just doing what needs to be done.

But this was more than being organized now. Arthur had made himself a mystery, and now everything he left was a clue. Arthur was now a missing person's case, and everything he had ever touched was evidence.

Or maybe not. Maybe Alfred was just being nosy, and was just a person snooping through another person's things. He was fine with that too.

Flicking through the emails in the laptop, Alfred smiled slightly at the familiar ones he saw.

" _Orlando is hot though, isn't it, Love?_ "

So this was from when Arthur was calling Alfred "Love."

" _Orlando is hot. Seems like it should be obvious, but I never could have predicted the fact of it on my skin. The reality of heat is harder to take than the idea of it. I guess that's anything, really. I suppose I'm describing to you absolutely everything that's ever been. I'm going to knock that off and say that the view of the ocean from my room would be beautiful, if it existed. I'm looking at a pool that's been drained for some reason. Bloody cockroach right in the middle of it._ "

" _Love, I live the glamorous life for us. Don't-_ "

The loud honk of a car horn startled Alfred out of his reading, and he went to correct the truck from driving out of its lane. The car he had almost hit sped ahead, and the driver cursed at him loudly.

Feliciano woke with a start. "What?"

Alfred laughed sheepishly. "Ah, nothing! No more reading from a laptop while driving."

Sighing, Feliciano rolled his eyes and removed the laptop from Alfred's lap. "Yeah no more reading from a laptop while driving."

Another billboard came up, and it caught Feliciano's eye. It was just someone's name. "BERNARD HAMILTON." Black text, white background, nothing else.

"Am I supposed to Google the name?" Feliciano questioned.

Alfred shrugged. "Dunno. If you really want to, go for it."

"Nah."

The ads on most of the billboards seemed ancient. Advertising local events that happened in 2005, fire sales for stores that have been torn down and buried and covered over in pitch and turf and concrete. A lot of them were just phone numbers and a message letting the viewer know that the billboard was available for rent. Had to be pretty cheap on this stretch.

"Did that billboard say something about seceding?" Feliciano twisted around in his seat to look at the receding figure. "I swear it did."

Alfred laughed. "Maybe. There was one that just said, 'HUNGRY?' in all capital letters, question mark at the end, black text, white background."

"Weird."

Alfred pulled over. "Hey, I wanna check something really quickly. Pass me the laptop, won't you?"

Feliciano knit his eyebrows as he passed the laptop over to Alfred. "You're not Googling the billboards, are you."

"No, no," Alfred waved him off. "Just a sudden thought I had."

He tapped away on the laptop for a bit, and Feliciano watched as his face fell, more and more.

First, Alfred checked the bank accounts.

Payments for years. Directly into Arthur's savings. Long before Alfred even had a hint that something was off. _Big_ payments. Regular, a salary, one would guess, looking at them. But Arthur had a job. Who was paying him a second salary? And for _what_?

Then, Alfred checked the old emails.

" _Love, checking into the Hampton Inn. Now_ this _is more my speed. Decent food, wonderful tea for free in the lobby, actual proper suites."_

" _Conference is tomorrow, so I have a day to explore everything that Simi Valley has to offer. Which is… Well, I'm not quite sure. It's right outside my hotel door, so I don't have to go far. There's the Reagan Library that I can spend a satisfactory five minutes thinking about never visiting, lots of hills and rocks that look like a backdrop in one of your stupid old western movies. Found a weirdly good shaved ice place. That's about it. Love, Arthur._ "

Alfred frowned, and frustration bubbled up.

He showed Feliciano the email, and Feliciano read through it quickly.

"I don't get it," Feliciano said timidly.

Alfred pulled up Google Maps and searched up Simi Valley, then showed it to Feliciano.

"Here's what I'm having trouble with, okay? Here's the question mark in this bullshit. See, there isn't a Hampton Inn in Simi Valley."

Feliciano's eyes widened. He took the laptop and began typing rapidly. "I…You're right. There really isn't."

"Yeah, and that's a little thing, really. It's nothing. Maybe Arthur was staying in a town nearby. But he said _specifically_ that it was right in Simi Valley."

A little thing. But that wasn't even all.

Alfred looked up historical weather data. That was what Arthur had reduced him to. It was cold in Orlando that weekend, the weekend Arthur was supposedly there. They had a cold snap. High in the low 50s and windy. He guessed that Arthur thought saying it was hot was a safe assumption. He shared his discoveries with Feliciano.

Little lies all through Arthur's emails to him. Everything not adding up to everything else, again and again. And all of them small and easy to dismiss on their own. But when Arthur was home, Alfred hadn't felt any lies from him at all. He was an open, honest presence. He didn't feel _secrets_.

"Was I a fool?"Alfred asked.

Feliciano took his hand and grasped it tightly, but couldn't find the right words to say for a bit.

"I don't think so," he said quietly.

But those emails. Arthur always prided himself on being a gentleman. He wouldn't lie unless he had good reason to.

"Where was he going on those constant trips?" Alfred muttered. "The constant trips he made for work, what was he _doing_ out there? And who the hell was paying him a secret salary to do it?"

Feliciano was helpless, so he just kept holding onto Alfred's hand and squeezing as tightly as he could without hurting him.

With a sigh, Alfred looked back up at the road. "We have to keep going."

"Yeah," Feliciano said. "We have to keep going."

There was another billboard with someone's name on it. "PETER KIRKLAND." Same design as the last one. Looks brand new. Creepy, Alfred thought. Same last name as Arthur. Never heard of him before. Who was buying these?

Well, they knew their audience. A landscape this flat and nothing, this grey and long, any kind of different is something.

"All right, you've got my curiosity, mystery billboard person," Alfred muttered. "Nothing I can do with it, just drive along thinking on it. But it's there. Good job! Now I'm wondering 'why?' about your ads."

Feliciano thought driving on a road like this made people ask the question "Why?' over and over again for all sorts of reasons. Mainly a quiet, despairing "Why?" aimed solely at oneself, unanswerable except by one's own actions.

There was also a billboard that says "Decadent Dogs" and has a picture of dogs. Probably one for dog grooming.

"'Decadent Dogs,'" Feliciano murmured. "Hmm."

Alfred suddenly jolted forward and twisted his head to look behind them. "That was- That was a God damn plantation we just passed! That's what that was! A tourist destination."

Feliciano felt a little sick. "What kind of species are we, though?"

Alfred had no answer to that.

They passed a few more of the billboards, the ones with names. The one they passed said "TRACY DRUMMOND."

Feliciano frowned. "Who _are_ you, Tracy?"

Alfred passed him the laptop. "Go for it."

Feliciano Googled Tracy Drummond. Her name was in a list with all the other names from the billboards. Found near major highways, all over the country, lives quietly broken under overpasses, on frontage roads, in broad wooded shelters. Lost, even in the age of GPS and Siri. Lost forever.

"A human bite in the neck or shoulder," Feliciano read, with a shaking voice. "Not elegant, like a vampire, not two pinprick holes. Ragged, big bites, spilling blood out until they died. Died alone on the sides of highways, or worse, not alone."

Alfred's grip on the steering wheel tightened. "Oh _fuck_."

"The media calls him 'the Hungry Man.'" Feliciano let out a trembling breath. "They _know_ about him, Alfred. He's a serial killer, and they've been looking for him for almost _two decades_. He only does it occasionally, only sometimes. Leaves behind, just once in awhile, a life torn open with his teeth."

"Oh my God." Alfred looked at Feliciano, his eyes unreadable. "They're victims of the Tribulus man, Feliciano. Every one of those names, every one of those billboards, there's- there's another one. It's a little distant so-"

"No," Feliciano whispered. "It is. White background, black text. 'NED FLYNN.'"

They didn't even need to look it up. They knew. Dead, somewhere. A big bite out of him.

"The Tribulus man has left a trail, has told us who he is," Feliciano whispered. "He is the Hungry Man, and he's not going to stop eating. He _wants_ us to know. He left these billboards as messages. Those names. Dots on a map. Last known whereabouts."

Alfred leaned forward. "Hold on, there's another billboard coming up. I can't quite read it yet."

Feliciano looked down at the laptop, ready to search up whatever he had to.

"Okay, it says… it…."

Feliciano looked up in alarm, only to be faced with Alfred's ashen white face.

"I'm pulling over."

Feliciano looked up at the sign, and his heart broke.

Next to him, Alfred sobbed. He curled up into a ball, and he screamed and cried and wailed.

"God damn it!" Alfred yelled. "Shit, _shit, SHIT!_ "

Black text, white background. New billboard, not old and wearing away, like most of the ones on the road. "ARTHUR KIRKLAND."

Feliciano let out a shuddering breath, and undid his seat belt. He reached over and undid Alfred's seat belt, untangled it from his body, and hugged Alfred.

"What the _fuck!_ Son of a bitch, that _asshole_ killed Arthur! It was _him_ , _he_ did it!"

Feliciano felt a warm sensation bloom from his eyes and drip down his face. Tears fell from his eyes as he held and comforted Alfred as best as he could. He rubbed Alfred's back in soothing circles, and he felt Alfred's arms come around him as well, sobbing into his shoulder all the while.

"Damn it," Alfred wasn't yelling anymore, but he was still sobbing. His words were only whimpers. "God fucking damn it." Every breath he let go of felt like the weight of the world falling on his chest, and every breath he took in felt like he was breathing through a five centimeter thick layer of dirt.

He had known for a long time that the chances of Arthur still being alive was near zero. He had known since long ago. But a tiny part of him had always hoped that maybe, _somehow_ , he was still out there, and trying to find his way back.

Alfred didn't realize it would hurt that much to have that last spark of hope smothered out.

Feliciano wouldn't say that Alfred had calmed down fully. He wasn't screaming anymore, and he wasn't speaking, but he was still crying, and he wouldn't let go of Feliciano's arm, but Feliciano figured now was as good of a time as any to try to figure out more of how to get on Arthur Kirkland's trail.

Feliciano grabbed the laptop and began navigating through the folders. Buried deep behind everything, past the school essays saved in formats the computer couldn't read anymore, past the photos of who he assumed was Arthur smiling drunkenly with the Eiffel Tower as a blur of light in the distance, past the porn, and the system files. The file was hidden, but Feliciano found it.

Payment information. Paperwork matching each of the mystery deposits Alfred had showed him in Arthur's account. Everything matched.

Bay & Creek Shipping. The company whose truck Feliciano sat in now with Alfred, going anywhere good businesses need transportation services.

Feliciano noticed that Alfred had finally stopped sobbing, and was now only hiccuping through the last of his tears.

"He was lying…" Alfred muttered, eyes flicking through the information. "Every convention he went on for work, he was somewhere other than he told me, that bastard. And Bay & Creek Shipping was paying him to do it."

Alfred's voice was hollow, and his eyes were the color of the deepest depths of the ocean.

His link on Feliciano's arm loosened, and instead, he took Feliciano's hand.

"This little shit." He swore under his breath, and turned to face Feliciano. "Listen, this isn't about finding out what the fuck my dead asshole of a boyfriend was hiding from me anymore. This is about us, okay?" Alfred's eyes were focused, and still bright from tears. His nose was red from crying, and his mouth was set in a grim line.

Feliciano nodded numbly.

Alfred's lips twitched into a smile. "This story is about us, the bullshit we've gone through together, and how we're going to survive, and hopefully make pizza together someday."

Feliciano's heart pounded in his chest. He prayed that he was interpreting Alfred's words correctly.

"Because that's what love is, and you can shoot me after everything we've survived in the past six months if I'm wrong, but I can't live without you, Feliciano."

Feliciano smiled dumbly. "I- I can't live without you either, Alfred. And making pizza together sounds great."

Alfred grinned. "Great. Time to figure out how to survive our story together now."

He wiped the tears from his eyes and turned back to the road, and Feliciano did the same.

Alfred's eyes avoided the right side of the road, where the billboard was. Feliciano found his eyes straying to the bottom of the billboard. As Alfred revved the engine and prepared to drive, Feliciano's eyes widened, and his hand stopped Alfred in his tracks.

"Alfred," he whispered. "Alfred look. On the side of the road."

Alfred followed his gaze.

There was something lying by the side of the road, under the billboard. A pile of clothes, or… no, that was a human. That was _definitely_ a human. There was no way it was a victim of the Tribulus man, no, that was far too neat. There was no way.

The shape was moving.

" _Dio mio_ , Alfred, it's getting up. Alfred, drive, go," Feliciano, tugged at Alfred's arm.

It was standing, and Alfred couldn't do it. He couldn't drive away, because here was the gamble he had no choice but to accept. What if it was an innocent person and they needed his help? And he _drove away_? He'd rather bet one way wrong than the other, he supposed. Maybe that made him a fool after all.

The figure was standing. It was turning, and Alfred and Feliciano were staying.

"It's… That's... " Feliciano openly stared in shock. "That's a kid. That is a boy and there is no way he is older than thirteen."

Alfred squinted in disbelief. "Wh- What is he _doing_ by the side of the highway like this? He _has_ to know there are far worse things than _people_ circling these roads."

The kid came over towards the truck.

Feliciano leaned out of the window.

"Hey! Hey, are you okay?"


	6. Chapter Six: Peter

**_Disclaimer:_ _Hetalia_ belongs to Hidekaz Himaruya, and _Alice Isn't Dead_ belongs to Joseph Fink. I do not own either of the works. If you believe that I do, please send a note in to your local police station reading as follows, "The local fool has been found, please do not be alarmed."**

* * *

Peter was asleep in Feliciano's lap, who in turn, was also asleep. Alfred could use some rest too, but he had a destination in mind. Somewhere needed going. He didn't know what he would find there, but it was a step, at least… having a direction, even if Alfred didn't know where that direction would take him.

Alfred and Feliciano were on their way, and it was all thanks to the kid.

Alfred couldn't just leave him there on the side of the highway like that.

"What do you know?" he asked. First thing he said, even before getting into the truck.

"What do _I_ know?" Alfred asked. "Lots of things. I know you're a kid, and you shouldn't be on the side of the road like that. So if we're making a list, we could start there."

"You stopped and looked at one of those billboards. The new ones. You were looking at them and crying, and your boyfriend started hugging you." Feliciano flushed red at the word "boyfriend." "Do you know who put them up? You must know _something_."

Alfred didn't say anything, just started driving, and Feliciano didn't say anything either, as it wasn't his story to tell.

The kid smelled strongly of something Feliciano couldn't place. Like a walk through a park, but condensed into a single overpowering scent. Floral, but also herb-y. It was intense.

"Okay, maybe you don't know anything," he said. "Fine. I don't know anything either!"

Feliciano had a lot of questions for him, and he was sure Alfred did as well, obviously, but he let all three of them stew in it for a bit. The kid kicked some of the books out of the way to make room for his feet.

"What's your name?" Feliciano asked him.

"Peter. Peter Kirkland."

Feliciano hummed. "I've heard of that name somewhere," he said. He couldn't remember where. Recognition without link.

"Common name, I guess," Peter said.

Alfred frowned. "Are you related to an Arthur Kirkland?"

Peter shrugged. "Not that I know of. Kirkland's a common name."

Peter wouldn't tell them anything. They were almost at Alfred's destination at this point, in the suburbs of Atlanta.

"No offense, I just have to know if I can trust you," Peter said. He really did sound sorry.

"Well, I have no idea if you can," Feliciano pointed out. "After all, we don't know what we're being trusted with."

"You've seen it too," Peter said. "Strange visions out on the highway? The road takes weird turns for you, same as it does for me."

"What have you seen?" Alfred asked.

"What have _you_ seen?" he asked, and smiled. "My dad and I, we used to travel a lot. Part of our life. On breaks from school we would go. Lots of time in cars, We started to see what other people were missing between the rest stops and Taco Bells. There's something dangerous out here. There's a crack somewhere, and something terrible is seeping through."

"Do you know what that something is?" Feliciano asked.

"Hmm," he said. "Don't you wish sometimes, that you could forget? That you could have your memory wiped, and then you wouldn't be a person wandering, but a person who was almost somewhere? A person about to arrive? And when you arrived, you could just stay? You could just stay."

Alfred and Feliciano answered immediately, with no hesitation. "Yes," they said.

"Yeah. God, yeah, me too," Peter answered.

When Alfred dropped off the shipment, Peter hid. He didn't ask him to. He didn't think he had to- after all, he'd been dropping off shipments with Feliciano right next to him, and nobody had questioned that, and the people at the supermarket seemed friendly enough. But Peter crouched on the floor of the cab, flipping through books.

After the delivery was done, he crawled back up into Feliciano's lap.. He held up _Grea_ _t Expectations,_ by Charles Dickens.

"Is this one any good?" he asked Feliciano.

Feliciano shrugged. "I'm not sure, I've never read it."

"Okay," Peter considered the cover for a moment before tossing it by his feet. He turned to Alfred. "Hey, I need to ask you something. Or, to _do_ something, and I can't tell you why. Would you do it?"

Alfred's first impulse was sarcasm or something similar, but instead, he just sighed.

"Honestly? Probably."

Peter took a deep breath. "Okay. Okay, I need to get to Swansea, South Carolina. Can you take me there?"

"What? South Carolina is the complete opposite direction of where I'm going. I have to get to the distribution center in-"

He cut Alfred off.

"Look, I wish I could tell you everything, but I can't. I'm still asking though. You're the first person I've talked to, like _really_ talked to in… I don't know, weeks? Months? I _need_ you to take me to Swansea. It has to do with… you know…"

He gestured, his hands circling out to indicate all the things neither of them were willing to specify.

Alfred snorted and shook his head. Feliciano sighed.

"Peter, we're adults, okay?" Feliciano smiled apologetically. "Alfred especially. He is an adult man with a job, and that job says he has to go to a distribution center-"

"Not drive a kid hundreds of miles to a town I've never heard of, for reasons the kid won't even tell me. I am a responsible God damn adult!"

Three and a half long hours later, Alfred sat in the driver's seat of a truck, with Feliciano in the passenger seat and Peter in his lap, in Swansea, South Carolina.

Swansea was not the most bustling of towns. Everything seemed nice, but also empty. Life had left this town, Feliciano thought. There was less of it than there once was.

Peter had directed Alfred to an EZ Stop on the highway, across from a farm stand that was closed, and not one, but two different car washes - both of which were also closed. Alfred pulled the truck up to the side of the EZ Stop, and turned off the engine. Nothing covert about a truck like this. The ass of it nearly blocked the entrance to the parking lot.

"So, what now?" Alfred asked.

"We wait," he said, and he picked up the Charles Dickens book and started reading.

"Alright then." Alfred took off his seat belt and opened the door. "Uh, I'm getting some donuts for me and Feli." (Feliciano smiled at this nickname.) "You want anything, Peter?"

He didn't look up from the book.

"Suit yourself."

Alfred closed the door.

There was a flyer in the window of the EZ Stop. The Easter Sunday Bash, hosted by DJ Rob-Dog, quote unquote "The Blind Man in Command." Underneath that, it said, "Remember, we are all sexy grown-ups. Ladies 21 or over and gentleman 25 or over, please."

Easter Sunday was almost a year ago.

The guy at the counter was withdrawn. Didn't comment on Alfred's truck or his choice in food - four donuts. Didn't comment on anything. Seemed laid back, which was fine with Alfred.

In the truck, Alfred and Feliciano ate donuts (Alfred ate three and a half, as Feliciano showed his gourmet habits and could barely finish half of one) and waited… and waited some more. The sky changed its shade, and then its color. Peter got fidgety.

"He was supposed to already be here," Peter said.

"Who was?" Alfred asked.

"Let's just ask inside," Feliciano decided.

The three went inside and Peter asked the guy at the counter if he had seen a cop car in this parking lot recently, specifically a cop car from Georgia. The guy's eyes widened, and he shook his head. Alfred revised his impression of him. He wasn't laid back, he was _terrified_. He had seen something, and he wanted desperately to forget. Feliciano caught on quickly.

"Hey, mister, look at me. I'm going to need you to look me in the eyes, okay?" Feliciano smiled. "I know what you've seen tonight. Now I have seen terrible things too, and so has this boy and this man, and as long as we're all quiet, nothing is going to change. Those terrible things are going to keep on happening. Do you want to live in a world where what you saw is possible? Or do you want us to try to change that?"

Feliciano held his gaze.

"I'm sorry," he said.

So Feliciano sighed, and said, "Si. Okay, how about this? Whatever scared you, mister, know that my boyfriend and I can be _so much_ scarier than that."

His mouth twitched downward and his fingers fidgeted. His eyes flew all over the room, panicking.

"I- I just don't know what you're talking about," he said. And as he said it, he pointed past the back wall of the store to the thick trees behind it.

"Nice," Alfred said. Feliciano smiled wryly.

It didn't take long poking through the leaves to find the cruiser that had been rolled there. No blood, but the seats had been torn up, slashed over and over.

And Peter, he collapsed by the car. Just went limp, gave up. He stayed there for a minute or two, letting whatever hope he had allowed to build in himself fade. And then he started telling Alfred and Feliciano a story.

Next to a gas station a couple hours north of New York City, Peter and his father, Tino, saw the Tribulus man - or as he knows him, as the world knows him, The Hungry Man. They saw him take a woman from her car. They saw what he did to that woman.

And his father did what Feliciano and Alfred could not: he tried to intervene. Tried to get the police involved, tried to get other people involved.

After that, Peter didn't have a father.

He went back to Georgia, was moved from home to home. No one would believe his story of what was out there, what he had seen. Or no one would _admit_ that they believed him.

There was this one policeman, Officer Ludwig Beilschmidt, that took a special interest in his case. Something close to kindness. He warned him that he needed to stop describing what he had seen, needed to stop trying to get people to believe him, that it would be easier and better for Peter if he just let that go.

But that wasn't an option. Not for him, anyways. He ran away, went looking for what scared him the most.

"You went looking for The Hungry Man?!" Alfred said. "He's- He's _dangerous_!" Feliciano whimpered. He could still feel his arm against his throat, still smell the rotten smell of his breath.

"Oh, is he?" Peter asked. "I must not know that. I must be stupid."

"No," Alfred tried again. "That's not what I meant," he said.

"Yes, it was. You just didn't know it was what you meant."

Arm against throat, over and over. Alfred noticed, and grabbed Feliciano's hand, squeezing it tightly in an attempt at comforting him.

A few months ago, Peter checked his email on the computer at this friend of a friend's house that was letting him crash for a bit, and there was an email from Officer Beilschmidt. He said that since Peter was clearly never going to let this go, he wanted to at least help him. But it had to be secret, no one could ever know. He told Peter to meet him at this date and time in the parking lot of the EZ Stop in Swansea, and he would give him the information he had been able to find, all of it.

"I think he hoped that somehow I could put a stop to it, or at least tell the world," Peter said. "I don't think he knew what he had signed up for when he signed up for it."

And now, here was his car. Not a trace of Officer Beilschmidt. Feliciano suspected that there would never again be a trace of Officer Beilschmidt. Not in this world.

Alfred and Feliciano helped Peter search the car together, but it had been wiped clean. No blood, the computer destroyed, no scraps of paper, no sign of what he might have been able to tell Peter.

They searched quickly, because all three of them felt it - that it wouldn't be safe to hang around much longer.

"Okay, uh, okay," he said. "He was based out of a precinct in Savannah. We'll go there, see if he left anything that could tell me what he wanted to know."

Alfred scoffed. "I am not helping you break into a police station, Peter! You know, you dragged me a ways out of my way, but you are _not_ landing me in jail! I have my own search to get back to."

"Alright. Take me to Savannah, drop me off. I'll be fine on my own. Been fine on my own for a while."

"We can't just-" Feliciano started. And Peter waved that off.

"Well, of _course_ you can! You already want to. I'm giving you permission. Take me to Savannah, leave me near that police station, drive away. You don't ever have to hear about this again."

"Okay, yeah. Okay," Alfred said. "We'll take you to Savannah."

"Thank you." He didn't sound annoyed or angry. He sounded maybe even relieved. "What is it you two are looking for anyway? What did you lose to end up circling these roads like me?"

"Come on," Feliciano said, taking him by the arm and leading him back to the cab with Alfred right next to him, before anyone or any _thing_ came back to the abandoned cruiser. "We'll tell you the whole story while Alfred drives."

On the way through Georgia, a house by the highway with a pile of trash burning in its front lawn. Big orange flames, thick plume of smoke, a man standing there watching it burn. Feliciano only saw it for a moment, and only in the corner of his eye. And that slice of time was stuck in his head forever that way.

The man never moving. The fire never consuming.

Even after a couple of days, Peter smelled as strong as ever. Something natural, but not. Organic, but aggressively so.

"What's that smell?" Alfred asked.

"I was wondering how long you'd be polite," Peter said. "It's heather oil."

Feliciano gave him a weird look. "Why are you drenched in heather oil?"

"Yeah, I don't know," he said. "I've heard The Hungry Man, he doesn't like it. Wards him off. Probably just rumors, but…" he shrugged.

"Where did you hear that?" Alfred asked.

Peter scoffed. "You think we're the only lives he's touched? You think you two are the only ones he's talked to? Word gets around. I've been wandering this country for a long time. Others have seen him. I've met them. Most were too scared to be as helpful as you two."

Feliciano laughed. "Bad news," he said. "We're scared too."

Alfred smiled wryly. "Kind of all the time. I used to go to therapy and shit," he said.

"Not important if you're scared," Peter said. "You're helping anyway. You can't control the feeling of fear. You _can_ control what you do while you're feeling it though. I learned that too."

"A hard-won lesson of life on the road?" Alfred asked.

Peter laughed. "Nah, I used to go to therapy too. Anxiety bros?" He held up a hand, and they made a perfect-contact high five, even if Alfred didn't look away from the road.

" _Che diamine_ , I feel left out now!" Feliciano whined playfully.

Alfred laughed. "Right. Anxiety bros. We're still only taking Peter as far as Savannah though."

Feliciano smiled softly at Peter. "Right. Then we have to get back to our thing."

"I know," he said. "Man, I hope you guys figure everything out."

"Yeah," Feliciano said.

And then he said, "I hope _you_ find _it_ before _it_ finds _you_."

"Yeah," Feliciano said. "Yeah."

They stopped the truck by a large park a few blocks north of the station in Savannah. Savannah looked like the way someone might vaguely remember a city looking - brick buildings sagged into themselves, the trees were more moss than trees.

Alfred parked next to Mason hall. The sign was bizarre, hand-drawn Mason symbols, a series of smaller hand-drawn icons, a pentagram, a chicken… Alfred swore that one of them was Link from Legend of Zelda. Maybe Link was a Mason?

They walked with him as far as the station.

"This is as far as we can take you," Feliciano said.

"I know. Listen, thanks, though. Good luck with Arthur."

He walked away. Feliciano and Alfred watched the kid walk towards the station, and Alfred turned back to the truck, and he just… _couldn't_. He couldn't let it happen like that. A single glance at Feliciano's conflict ridden expression showed he thought the same.

"Peter!" Alfred shouted.

He stopped, and Feliciano smiled.

"Yeah?" he said.

Alfred looked at Feliciano, who grinned. "Let's break into a police station."

Peter smiled.

"Thank God! I kept thinking, 'One of them's gonna offer to help me, right?' And then neither of you did, and I was like, 'Man, I thought they were good people!'"

Alfred laughed. "So we're good now?"

"Good? Mm… Remains to be seen. You're cool, though. Let's do this."

And so they did.


	7. Chapter Seven: Breaking and Entering

**Disclaimer: It has been seven chapters, and we passed the halfway mark of this story two chapters back. If you still don't understand that Hetalia belongs to Hidekaz Himaruya and Alice Isn't Dead belongs to Joseph Fink, we're going to have a bit of a problem.**

* * *

Peter, Feliciano, and Alfred were going to break into a police station in Savannah, Georgia, so that they could find any evidence of what this Officer Beilschmidt had been planning to tell Peter. They just weren't clear how they were going to do it.

The front was a big glass window, fine. But the rest was a cinder block. Barred windows, no back door… nothing that could be crawled through or into. It was a box with one opening, and that opening was right on the street. Even trying to scope the place was hard. There were cops everywhere, hanging out, chatting, and staring at the three as the tried to casually walk by.

"Nothing casual about the three of us, I guess," Alfred said.

"Could we just run in and run out?" Peter asked.

Feliciano clicked his tongue. "Well, there's only one door. If you run in, chances are, you're not going to run back out.

They took their fourth walk down the block. An officer across the street watched them with open suspicion. After what happened in Kansas, Feliciano could feel his heart pound just looking at his uniform, the contempt on his face.

"Not the front then," Alfred said. "Alright, Peter, you keep walking this way. Feli and I will walk down that alley. Meet us on the other side."

As the two walked into the alley, Feliciano laughed quietly. "So when did you decide on 'Feli'?"

Alfred grinned and grabbed his hand in his own, swinging it lightly as they walked. "No idea, to be honest."

At the end of the alley was a dumpster. Alfred sighed, and climbed up on it, Feliciano following shortly afterwards. From there, both got on the roof, crawling, body prone, so they wouldn't be seen and no footsteps would be heard from below.

Along the top of the building were skylights. Feliciano crawled to the edge of one. He was above a desk that needed decluttering and a floor that needed mopping.

He inched his way back, motioned for Alfred to come with him, and hopped off as casually as someone could hop from roof to dumpster to ground, and met back with Peter, explaining his plan to Alfred as they walked.

"Okay, so here's what, Peter," Alfred said. "We're gonna need you to make some kind of distraction."

"What kind of distraction?"

Feliciano shrugged helplessly. "That, we're not sure. But we need to do something very stupid and very loud, so we need you to do something more stupid and more loud than us."

Peter grinned. "I know just the thing."

Feliciano sighed, but grinned along anyways, and Alfred did likewise. "Don't tell us. We'd have to try to stop you. Just go for it."

Feliciano and Alfred got back on the roof, and waited. Feliciano couldn't see anything, crouched as they were, but if he couldn't tell when Peter's distraction happened, then the distraction wasn't big enough. They waited and waited, and Feliciano just _knew_ that something had gone wrong and Peter had been caught, and he had aided and abetted him into this nonsense.

And then the distraction came, and it was certainly… _something_.

Peter had gone a few blocks, broke into a car, _hot-wired_ it, pointed it at the glass front of the station, gave it a rev, and rolled out. It wasn't going fast enough to hurt anyone - it didn't do much more than make a loud noise as it took out the glass - but not something you could really stop either.

Some of them ran after him, but he had planned out a route that got him into hiding before they could even turn the corner.

Even as an adolescent, he'd been on the road by himself a long time. And a kid in a place this dangerous, the one thing they knew more than any other thing is how not to be noticed.

When the car came through, everyone ran to it. Feliciano got up immediately and started stomping until the skylight gave. The sound was _so_ loud, but the car hadn't stopped moving. It was taking out desks on its way to the reception area's wall. Feliciano gulped, and jumped down, Alfred following right afterwards. Alfred immediately grabbed a chair and dragged it over to the skylight. Feliciano wasted a good thirty seconds checking all five of the desks before he found Ludwig Beilschmidt name plate. By that point he had no time to spend looking, so he grabbed everything he could from on top of and inside the desk, threw it into his bag, and stood back up.

At this point, the problem was obvious. Alfred was panicking, because even with a chair under it, the skylight was too high, and it would still take a miracle for both of them to get up and out before anyone noticed.

Of course the ceiling was farther away from the ground than it looked. Easier down than up. Feliciano and Alfred were standing in the back of a building with only one exit, and every cop in shouting distance was gathering at that exit looking at the goddamn car that had gone through it.

They were trapped.

It had been maybe less than a minute. Attention was still entirely on the crash, but there were seconds, maybe, before someone noticed Feliciano and Alfred standing there. The idea of hiding flashed through Feliciano's mind for a moment, waiting until everyone went away for the night. But first of all, it didn't seem likely that that was a thing that happened at a police station. They probably had a night shift, and even if they didn't, there was no way they were going to just leave the building unattended that was _missing its entire front wall_.

Every second they stayed, the probability of Alfred and Feliciano getting caught ticked toward one. Even with the chair, the skylight was too high and rimmed with broken glass. Feliciano looked around for… _what_? What did he think he would find? Feliciano supposed he looked around for a miracle.

But there wasn't a miracle. Only him, Alfred, and whatever Feliciano decided to do next.

So he steeled himself for the pain, clambered onto the desk, and motioned for Alfred to come over.

"We are going to get out of here," Feliciano said, voice shaking but eyes resolute. "And I want you to get out first, because I am not going to abandon you, Alfred."

Alfred nodded, eyes wide but focused, "Yeah. Yeah. A kiss for good luck?"

Feliciano laughed a little at that. "That'll wait for when we're back in the truck. Now _go_!"

Alfred nodded, turned, and hurled himself from the desk up at the skylight, sucking in his stomach in what he thought of as an half-assed attempt to keep from getting bled out on the glass.

His stomach slammed into the broken glass, and he let out a short yelp of pain. He pulled himself up as he heard the shouting of the cops.

Even with the excitement of the car, there was no way they weren't going to notice a man jumping off of a desk, and pulling himself through a skylight. Alfred turned and looked back down at Feliciano, who stood trembling, holding onto his bag.

" _Feli!_ "Alfred hissed, panicking. "Come _on_!"

Feliciano turned and looked up at Alfred. His hands shook, and he nodded his head. Without giving himself a moment to think better of it, Feliciano threw himself from the desk up at the skylight, also sucking his stomach in. His hands slapped on the roof, and his chest slammed into the edge, and that did some bad things. But there wasn't much glass where he hit, so he avoided getting completely skewered.

His chest was on fire, and he could hear the cops getting closer. Alfred grabbed his hand, but even still, Feliciano's hands were rapidly sliding back, but he could hear footsteps coming, he could hear shouts, and he knew he was moments behind a hand wrapped around his ankle.

Feliciano thought about the parking lot in Kansas. He thought about an arm on his throat. And through the numbness of shock, he pulled himself all the way up through the skylight and off the roof, and onto the ground with a brief awkward stop on the dumpster that didn't so much slow his fall as roll his ankle. Alfred followed him down shortly afterwards.

And so, both of them bleeding and Feliciano limping slightly, they tore as fast as the could away from the station.

They were rounding the corner from the front, five of them running after Feliciano and Alfred. And that's when Peter, bless him, ran behind them, shouting, "Hey, assholes! How's your front window?" as he sprinted in the opposite direction.

That took care of three of them.

Feliciano honestly didn't know how they lost the other two. He never looked back, he ran until the world went dark at the edges, until all he could hear was the hollow of his and Alfred's breath as he clutched at his bag. It must have been a memorable sight in quaint Old Town Savannah - blood dripping down from both of their chests, big ragged gasps as the sprinted as well as they could, injured as they were - but they made it back to the truck and threw themselves in and sat there, gasping and wheezing, trying to figure out if they'd gotten away, and hoping Peter would come along soon.

He did, about seven minutes later, flying in through the door and landing in a heap on the floor of the truck with a, "I'm here, now _drive_!"

They were about a half hour out of town on the highway when they started laughing. Every time one of them met another one's gaze, another wave would come. They laughed until there was no sound, only uncontrollable shaking, and then had hiccups for the next two hours.

And, of course, Alfred kissed Feliciano. As hard and as long as he could, and he probably would've gone for longer if Peter hadn't made a gagging noise from next to them.

And that's how they broke into a police station.

They stopped in a parking lot off 95 and went through what Feliciano had taken. There was a lot of crap on his desk. Reports, department memos, printed out emails (because it became apparent that Ludwig was the type of person who printed out his emails in order to read them, which would have been amazing luck if his emails had been about _anything_ other than the dull minutiae of his job), ticket quotas, reminders of policies, automatic emails to let him know that someone had responded to his comment on Huffington Post.

"Wait," said Peter, after nearly an hour of tedious reading in which Alfred learned a lot about Ludwig's opinions on Naruto Shippuden. "Do any of these places seem important to you?"

It was a handwritten list of cities, written on the back of one of the printed out emails.

Everett, Kingston, Waco… There was a bunch of them. Most of them had been crossed out, but it was what was written at the top of the paper that tore at Alfred, brought fresh grief and rage and misery that he hadn't known was still there.

"Vector H," it said at the top of the page. Just like Arthur had written in his papers.

"Yeah," Alfred managed. "This is definitely something."

Feliciano moved over to look, and his eyes widened in sympathy. He reached for Alfred's hand, and Alfred squeezed his tightly.

Most of the town names were scribbled out, but one of them had been circled.

"That's as good as a next step as I think we're gonna get," Feliciano murmured.

"Okay, great. This is gonna be a long drive," Peter said. "You got an iPhone hookup in here or something?"

Peter laughed, but Alfred and Feliciano didn't. Or rather, they couldn't. Alfred looked at him. Really stopped, and _looked_. Peter was so young, and _so fucking brave!_

He's so much braver than me, Alfred thought to himself. Faster, stronger, by almost any measure a better person.

Alfred looked at Feliciano, and he knew what they had to do.

"Well, you can kick me out if you want," he said. "Be a dick after everything, but I'll just find another way to get there."

And Alfred knew he would. Feliciano thought he had never met anyone so dedicated and brave. It made him wonder what _he_ was.

"It's silly, what we're doing, Peter," Feliciano said softly. "Maybe even it's wrong. But the three of us, we can't _not_ do it, right?"

He nodded, jaw set.

"Right," Feliciano continued. "We… We would be out there no matter what, even though whatever is waiting in that town, it's not a good thing. Maybe it's the kind of thing a person doesn't come back from.

"And Peter, we are foolish, _foolish_ people, Alfred and I. Because we're going to go. No matter what, we are going to that place. But you are not a fool, Peter. Whatever it is we're working against, they should be _very_ afraid of you. Because I think you're our best shot at stopping it.

"Of course, you won't stop anything if you get yourself killed poking around some town that may or may not have the answers, but that doesn't have to happen. Because no matter what, I'm going to go there. Whether you go or stay, it is too late for me.

"I need you to be smarter than me… Than us." Alfred grabbed Feliciano's hand and held it tightly. "We need you to lay low, and keep trying to hear what you can hear, and we need you to grow, and get even smarter and more powerful than you are now.

"Let us be the fools. You be the one that lives."

Feliciano broke off, and struggled not to let tears come out of his eyes. Alfred gently rubbed his back and took over.

"Peter, listen. Whatever needs to be done in that place, we will fucking do it. We really will, and if we fail, you will be right here, alive and ready."

They didn't say please. Didn't try to touch Peter's shoulder. Either he agreed with them or didn't, he had gone through enough to which.

Peter glared at them. His arms were crossed. Then he uncrossed them and pulled them into a hug.

"Okay," he said. "Okay. Okay, okay."

He shook through the hug, and his tears soaked into both Alfred and Feliciano's shirts.

Peter let them book a room for him for a few weeks at an Extended Stay America. They said their goodbyes, and Alfred and Feliciano hit the road once more.

Alfred sat in the passenger seat, one hand on the steering wheel, Feliciano snoring next to him softly.

He needed to sleep, eventually. But every moment he spent sleeping was a moment where he wasn't driving. Hopefully. And this was a _long_ drive.

Eventually, he pulled over into a parking lot at a random place in Meridian, Mississippi. Locked the doors, unfastened Feliciano's seat belt while being careful he wouldn't wake. Then he laid down, and slept.

When Alfred awoke, it was noon, and Feliciano was awake next to him, food in his hands. Turned out that the place they had stopped last night was a fast food place. Feliciano had a box of fried things, cheesy things, sweet tea.

After they ate, Alfred drove over to the motel across the road, and both of them grabbed a quick shower, their first in… well, a while. Alfred watched the water pool around his feet in a beige bathtub. Somehow he couldn't look away. He stood there for a long time, watching water run through his toes.

And then he was back in a driver's seat with Feliciano next to him, and back on the road, and back out of Mississippi.

Half a day later, they were in Texas.

The average flag size in Texas was so much bigger than anywhere else they'd been, Feliciano noticed. He knew the usual joke, but what was it about Texas that makes them want their flags so big? American flags the size of minivans, the size of small houses, waving them from car dealerships and libraries.

There was something to be said, obviously, about insecurity. The wisdom is that the most performatively loud person at the party is the most insecure. And Texas is nothing if not performatively loud - their threats of secession, the bluster that permeates their politics, and of course, these huge flags.

And then you see the countryside of Texas, and… maybe you understand a bit. Because it is beautiful, sure, but a lot of it was empty. Empty in a way that feels heavy. Like the big cities in Texas are just fronts to hide that it's mostly an empty state, with a population trying to be as loud as possible so no one will notice that all of them live tucked away in the east.

"All hail West Texas, right?" Feliciano said under his breath, laughing a little.

Most of this could be said about America as a whole, and probably should be, but Feliciano wasn't in America at the moment. He was in Texas.

Fourteen hours later, they crossed into California, north of Lake Havasu. The Inland Empire. Land that would hardly be populated if it weren't for the tempting light of L.A. just over the San Gabriel Mountains. A daily commute for those who want a house more than they want the hours of their day. Land that would be uninhabitable if it weren't for the water brought in by canals, portioned out to farmers, who sold their portions to the thirsty cities, making them water farmers.

Foreclosures, and cabbage, and Vons Supermarkets… the Inland Empire.

They passed a town called Needles. Got on 15 at Barstow, and then 2,400 miles from Savannah, Georgia, Alfred pulled into the town that was circled on Officer Beilschmidt's list: Victorville, California. What was hidden here? Or what was hiding?

Alfred supposed that he and Feliciano were about to find out.


	8. Chapter Eight: The Other Town

**Disclaimer: Listen. If you still don't understand that _Hetalia_ belongs to Hidekaz Himaruya and _Alice Isn't Dead_ belongs to Joseph Fink after eight chapters of this, you need to seek professional help.**

* * *

Alfred parked the truck outside of town. Feliciano bought a very cheap used car from an ad online.

"This barely runs," the woman warned, as he picked up the car from his driveway. "Won't last a year."

"Who's think that far ahead?" Feliciano retorted, and drove off.

They weren't sure where to start. Victorville was small, but not _that_ small. A slice of suburb too far from the city to be a suburb. Strip malls, and industry, and agriculture, and the great desert close around it, making every apartment complex and shopping center seem no more than permanent wisps of grass along the road.

Alfred and Feliciano spent a few days splitting up and going to local businesses, buying pizza, getting a haircut, buying clothes at Kmart, and everywhere trying to make idle conversation, gently poking their way through to anything strange that maybe people noticed or maybe they forced themselves _not_ to notice.

But everything was normal. Relentlessly so.

Until the McDonald's Alfred and Feliciano were grabbing lunch together, in what turned into a fairly involved conversation between Alfred and the girl at the counter about a comic series they were both into, she mentioned something about "The Other Town."

"What other town?" Alfred asked.

"Huh?" she said. "No, no, n-no other town, or- or like, um, Apple Valley, I guess? It's right there, you know, the other town, so, uh…"

She wouldn't let Alfred steer the conversation away from the comics and soon she said she had to get back to work. Wouldn't talk to Alfred again, only nodded vaguely when he said goodbye.

Alfred let Feliciano know about the slip-up immediately.

They started circling back to places they had already been, and started bringing up the phrase "the other town." Never as a direct question, just set into conversation for the person to react or not.

The woman at the hair salon winced when Feliciano brought it up while getting his hair dyed.

"I don't want to talk about it," she said. "They leave us alone. You leave it alone."

The man at the bike shop got angry when Alfred mentioned it. "Don't even say that in here! You don't say those words in my store, you will bring him in!"

"Who?" Alfred asked.

"Get out!" he yelled.

The guy at the party store just shuddered when Feliciano and Alfred mentioned it together. "Jeez, dude!" he said. "You can't just talk about The Other Town."

"Why not?" Feliciano asked.

"Because when you talk about The Other Town, there's a tendency for him to… _oh, shit!_ " he swore.

"What?" Alfred said.

"You two need to hide, right now," he said.

Where they were in their lives, if Feliciano and Alfred were told to hide, _they hide_. Alfred crouched behind a wire bin of cheap inflatable balls. Feliciano dove behind the back aisle. The door chime rang.

"Hey, Mike," said a voice that was not a voice that Feliciano knew, but… had a familiar tone, like the accidental hollowing of the wind.

"Oh, hey, man! So…" Mike said.

"Son, no need to be worried like that. Just heard that someone might be asking around about The Other Town."

"Oh?" said Mike.

"Yeah. Seen anyone like that?"

"Uh, not that I remember."

"Don't you think you'd remember if they mentioned The Other Town, son? Isn't that the kind of thing that would stick out in your memory?"

Feliciano shifted slightly so he could see out from behind the aisle, and Alfred did the same to peek out from the edge of the bin. The man was wearing a dirty polo shirt. His fingernails were yellow just below the surface, his skin stretched oddly over his face. Feliciano had never seen this man before. It wasn't the Tribulus man, but it was another man like him.

 _There was more than one._

"Uh, no," Mike said, "you're right. No. No, definitely no one asked about that."

The other Tribulus man stared at Mike for a while. Alfred and Feliciano wondered if they were watching the last few seconds of his life slip away from all of them, but instead the Tribulus man turned around without speaking, and walked out of the store.

Feliciano waited a full minute, then came out. Alfred followed suit shortly afterwards.

He turned to Mike. "Thank you," he said.

"Yeah, screw you," said Mike. "Just get out of here."

And they did get out of there. The other Tribulus man was making his way toward the Vons nearby.

They walked after him.

Inside the Vons, light blared and music murmured. An easy listening strings version of Masters of War. No sign of the other Tribulus man.

What did it mean that there was another one? The one Feliciano and Alfred knew of had seemed a nearly unstoppable force of destruction, and now that force had doubled.

Feliciano and Alfred split up.

Alfred walked down the aisles, and each one was empty. Back again across the store. Where had the rat bastard gone?

Alfred turned a corner in the Frozen Foods aisle, and he was just a few feet in front of him. Back turned, his shoulders bouncing like he was laughing, but the sound was more like a man drowning. Thick, desperate gasps. He shouted no words, just sound and then back to gasping.

A Vons employee turned a corner on the other end of the aisle, saw the man, and immediately walked away.

Alfred retreated a few aisles down, trying to stay out of sight.

Eventually, the other Tribulus man headed back to the exit, not a glance in Alfred's direction. Every few feet his right leg would give, like it had no muscle nor bone in it, and his entire body would stoop to the side and then unsteadily lurch its way back up with the next step.

There was no sign of employees of customers at checkout, and Alfred rendezvoused with Feliciano immediately.

Out in the parking lot, he got into a car - a silver Toyota, a few years old, relatively clean. He turned left out of the shopping center, and they followed.

At first, they were surrounded by strip malls, but then the right hand of the road fell away to desert. Its darkness was complete. Off in the distance, some sort of factory, all glow and smoke. Sweating, breathing human beings on a night shift inside that factory. And on every side, darkness and sand.

They hit a T intersection and made a left, past the bus station. A bus was just pulling out on late night departure to who-knows-where. On the other side of the road was the Route 66 Museum, a museum to road tripping, to distance, to how big and spread out America was.

Both Feliciano and Alfred had experienced how big and spread out it was, the width and length of it. America was a country defined as much by distance as by culture.

The desert edged onto the road. They were outside of town now. Stacks of box cars, another factory. An outpost of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, that greedy giant. They passed under the wire, almost invisible against the sky. They carried the lights to Hollywood, to air conditioning in Malibu. Here was beyond the glamour. Here was only the machine.

They turned again, slag heaps and stars. A road just called Gas Line Road that intersected a block away with Power Line Road. Finally, a military airport of some kind. Barbed wires and hangers. They drove along the fences for a while. The road was completely empty, and so they had to drive without headlights. Alfred watched the car and tried to mirror is movements. It was terrifying, but it also felt peaceful and quiet, like swimming underwater.

A small plane came in for landing, and Feliciano watched the whole thing happen. Red lights blinked their way down, and then finally touched the Earth. And then Feliciano realized that he hadn't been breathing, and then Alfred hit the curb and Feliciano screamed. Alfred's breath hitched in surprise, and Feliciano apologized rapidly as they both stopped and stared at the other Tribulus man's car.

The other Tribulus man drove through a hole in the fence into the airport. The hole looked accidental, but was exactly wide enough for a car. Alfred counted a slow ten, which was more of a thirty for Feliciano, and then he followed. If he noticed them, he noticed them.

Alfred and Feliciano were almost always afraid. In fact, they were absolutely terrified a good ninety percent of their waking time. But they still did what had to be done.

By the time Alfred drove through, there was no sign of him. A shape loomed at Feliciano from the dark. It was huge, with a snub-nosed face and broad wings. A passenger jet. A big one, for international flights. Any company names it once had had been scratched off. Silent, earthbound. A dead giant.

As Feliciano's eyes adjusted, he saw more of them - line after line of dead jetliners. Alfred drove the car slowly through them. He couldn't see the car. At this point, with the engine coughing loudly through the airplane graveyard, they could very well have been the ones being stalked. It would have been laughably easy to circle around behind them.

Alfred passed an enormous wing, and its elongated shadow from the distant lights lingered after him.

"We lost him," Feliciano whispered. "There's nothing."

Alfred remained silent and inched through the lines of airplanes that had avoided disaster again and again, only to end up here, on the ground, forever.

And then, lights up ahead. So close that Alfred had to slam on the breaks, and so close that Feliciano _almost_ screamed again.

Alfred turned of the engine and left the beater behind, Feliciano right by his side as they ran across the hard-packed dirt. His car was pulling through a gate in a high wall, a jet behind him, and the wall became almost intangible again against the desert hills. The wall was featureless, save a small sign by the gate.

The sign read, "Tribulus."

Tasting sour acid in his mouth and feeling Feliciano grab his hand, Alfred circled around and found a point where the hillside rose above the wall. It was thick with thorny bush, but they picked their way through until, panting and bleeding lightly, they reached a point where they could see over the compound.

Inside the wall was a little town. The Other Town. Houses, a market, a gas station, even at this hour the town's population was out in full force.

Feliciano let out a quiet wail of misery, and Alfred was left numbed with disbelief.

" _Fuck_."

Everyone one of them was like the Tribulus man. All of them. Loose skinned, odd movements, none of them spoke, although sometimes one would laugh, long and loud, and then return to monastic silence.

And then Feliciano and Alfred saw him. The _original_ him. The Tribulus man. The Hungry Man. He was leaning on one of the pumps at the gas station, reading a newspaper.

It was an entire city of them. These _things_ , so dangerous, so _evil_ that a single one of them almost destroyed Alfred and Feliciano both. Were they, each of them, serial killers? _Uncaught?_ Living together buried in this airplane boneyard? On an airbase. Hidden on a _U.S. military airbase._

Alfred let out a shuddering breath, and grasped Feliciano's hand tightly. He turned, and looked into Feliciano's eyes. He saw that tears were streaming down his face, and that his body shook with sobs.

Alfred felt his chest tighten. He put his forehead up against Feliciano's, and he felt sorry. He was sorry that he had failed Feliciano, sorry that he had failed Peter. Even a little bit sorry that he failed Arthur.

Feliciano's hand trembled in Alfred's, and Alfred leaned forward and kissed him on the lips gently before pulling away. Their foreheads remained pressed together.

"Feliciano," he whispered quietly, the first tear of what was certain to be many slowly squeezing out of his eye. "Feliciano. Feliciano, I love you."

Feliciano shook, and he struggled to speak. " _T-Ti amo_ , Alfred." His voice and body shivered with each breath he took.

Alfred nodded, and he smiled bitterly. "This… This is beyond us. Let's give up, Feliciano. Let's go settle down somewhere."

The expression on Feliciano's face broke Alfred's heart. It was relief, relief that he didn't have to be the one who had to suggest the idea, but also the shame and misery and pure _disgust_ at himself, that he was about to drop everything he had worked so hard on for so long.

"Let's go home."


	9. Chapter Nine: Go Home Again

**_Disclaimer:_ Chapter Nine is up. I am tired from typing all night, but it was worth it. You know what else is worth it? Telling you that I don't own _Hetalia_ or _Alice Isn't Dead_ again and that they're owned by Hidekaz Himaruya and Joseph Fink respectively, so I can finally go to freakin' sleep.**

* * *

Alfred hadn't been home for months. It was weird how when you're gone for a long time, the things you leave behind are exactly how you left them. Alfred knew that didn't sound like it was weird, it was just something that one would expect from inanimate objects, but it actually happened. It was weird.

He thought about the _him_ that left those things in those places, and everything that had happened to him since, and it didn't track. It didn't feel possible, even though it wasn't just possible, it was unavoidable. People would always live in the remnants of the life they've led up until this point, making do with whatever they left for themselves.

Neighbors would want to know where Alfred had been, friends would be worried, but he had pushed away friends and shut out neighbors after Arthur's death, and there was no one left to know or care except Feliciano.

Alfred did the best to return to routine, and Feliciano did his best to match. It felt like play acting, portraying the role of themselves, and they weren't even doing a good job of that.

There was, as always, a jumpy fear in Feliciano. He felt watched. He felt threatened. But he could not specify _how_. He never _saw_ anyone watching him or Alfred. It didn't matter how many times he woke up in the middle of the night, gasping and sobbing from nightmares, clinging onto Alfred and turning on the lights. There was never anyone there.

Feliciano could not prove it to himself, but he did not feel safe. He did not feel like he had escaped. And then one night, three weeks after he had moved into Alfred's old home, he heard a sound while Alfred was sleeping. Like haphazard clapping, skin slapping skin arrhythmically. Adrenaline surged through him, and he shook with it. But he crept through the dark house toward the noise.

 _Slap, slap! Slap, slap!_

He was around the corner from the living room when, in the reflection of the TV, he saw a shape he could not immediately interpret. A strange bent shape, moving in a loose and weird way.

Feliciano smelled tilled earth. He smelled his own sweat, and it smelled like cleaning chemicals and gas stations.

"Whoop!" the shape said. "Whoop!"

 _Slap, slap! Slap, slap!_

Around the corner of the living room, with just one eye, Feliciano leaned. Just a quick peek.

It was the Tribulus man, of course it was. Not the one that had followed Feliciano, not the one that led him and Alfred to their secret home, but another one still. He was bent grotesquely backwards, like his spine was broken, and he was loosely swinging his arms back and forth in a circle so that they slapped his chest and his back.

 _Slap, slap!_

He gurgled.

"Whoop!" he shouted. "Whoop!"

Feliciano ran back to the bedroom knowing full well that the Tribulus man could hear him now, slammed and locked the door, and fell into Alfred's arms. Feliciano cried, he cried, and he told Alfred everything in short gasping breaths, and they held each other as tightly as if they were trying to fuse into one being, and the sound stopped. They waited for the door to break down, waited for death to come laughing at them in their face, but nothing else happened, except, eventually, morning.

But that was only the start of it.

Even then, Alfred and Feliciano tried to live their life. But what else could they do? Alfred had spent years afraid that each day would be the day he died, terrified of mortality, and that had many downsides, but it did teach him how to push through fear, how to live on even as inside he might be sobbing.

He bought groceries, made dinners with Feliciano, found out that Feliciano actually brought a very large sum of money that could sustain them for multiple years with him to America, and started a job search.

No one knew what to do with Alfred's resume. Middle-tier white-collar worker, and then this long stretch as a truck driver, and now back to searching for office jobs.

"Was this, ah, about finding yourself? Job agencies would ask about the strange span in Alfred's work history.

"It was about finding _something_ , sure," Alfred said.

"Mmm… uh, well, we'll call you."

But even as Alfred's routine continued, so did the watchings and warnings.

One evening as Feliciano was showering, Alfred looked out his window to see, on his neighbor's balcony, a smiling Thistle man. A different one, his grin cracking his face on one side, while the other hung slack.

Alfred panicked. Where were his neighbors? Were they still alive? And if they weren't, what could he do? Call the police? There was no one in this world who could help him.

Footsteps in the house while Alfred and Feliciano huddled together in the bedroom, shivering in fear. Off kilter and dragging, like a wounded animal, in the hours were morning and night mingled.

A car on the block that neither Alfred nor Feliciano had ever seen before, but was now always parked in a place with a clear view of their house.

Alfred was washing Feliciano's hair one night in the shower, when he actually _dared_ to shower. Any sort of vulnerability became a calculated risk. Would it be safe to sleep now? Could he shower with Feli for these few minutes?

And that time he misjudged the moment, because Alfred could feel that there was something with them, in the shower. But he couldn't _see_ anything. That was the thing, _nothing was there!_

But there was, and both he and Feliciano knew it.

He could smell the mowed grass and fertilizer, could hear between the crack of water on the tub a "Yip! Yip! Yip!"

Alfred turned off the shower, and Feliciano shivered in the cold. No sound. Alfred wrapped Feliciano in a towel and looked all over the bathroom. No one, nothing was there. But something _was_ there! He turned the shower back on, the smell was even stronger, and buried in the sound of the water: "Yip! Yip! Yip!"

Alfred's anxiety was becoming a monster of its own. Now that it had a focus, it was overpowering. He could feel himself shutting down, wanting to do nothing at all, to not get out of bed, to wait for them to take him and Feliciano.

And what were they even trying to warn Alfred and Feliciano away from? They had gone home! They had given up!

And thinking about that, Alfred realized… These were not warnings. His and Feliciano's fates were sealed. This was just them having _fun_. _Playing_ with them.

Staying home, trying to wait them out until they got bored, that was not an option. Because the ending was preordained.

Alfred thought about trying to disappear, and even spoke to Feliciano about it. Vanishing off the map - or more accurately, driving into the map of America with Feliciano so deep, and so far, that no one would ever find them again.

But each time, they both came to the conclusion that there was a fine line between disappearing from view and disappearing altogether. How far could they run? How much could they change before there was nothing left for them to hide? Before all that was left was the disguise?

There was only one escape, and Alfred talked to Feliciano about it. Feliciano agreed without missing a beat. Feliciano and Alfred would have to be the ones to come after _them_. They would go where the Tribulus men lived, and confront them there. Only then would it end, one way or another.

Alfred called Bay & Creek. He told them that he was coming back, if that was okay with them. But he would have to plan carefully with Feliciano. Even _one_ of those things was powerful, and there were so _many_ of them! To just rush in would be death. Or… Alfred didn't know what. Everything worse than death, Feliciano supposed.

Feliciano thought that there had to be some pattern to their comings and goings. Even monsters, or… whatever these things were, they had to have some routine to their lives. If they had any hope of destroying them, let alone _surviving_ , Feliciano figured that he would have to know that routine better than they did.

They would build a hidden lean-to on the hill above their town, would disappear into it with food and water, and probably a bucket. Gross, but it's what they'd have to do, most likely. This would have to be done carefully and slowly, or it would not be done at all.

And then, all of that changed. Because there was a knock at the door.

Feliciano glanced at Alfred, who hadn't noticed, and was typing away at the laptop, an intense expression on his face. Feliciano went to the second floor, and leaned out the window to see who was there.

No one. Just a piece of paper, the wind gently nudging it off the porch.

Feliciano went down, reached his arm out, grabbed the paper, and held the door locked again as quickly as he could.

On the paper was an address, written in a scrawl with a pen that barely had any ink left, more carved into the paper than written. It took Feliciano a moment to even register what he was seeing, and then he was telling Alfred, and they were on the road driving south.

There would be no watching, no planning. They had grabbed random items they figured would be useful. Alfred and Feliciano were going to… Alfred didn't know. Feliciano guessed that they were going to drive the truck full speed through the front gate. What would they do after that? Feliciano didn't know. The paper had an address on it, for an Extended Stay America, with a room number.

Feliciano called Peter. He picked up, thank God. Feliciano told him that he needed to start running again, that they found him.

Fast forward a few days, and there they were.

They were facing the gates, the engine was running, and the headlights were off.

Feliciano took deep breaths, and Alfred sighed, running his hand through his hair.

"Okay. Okay." Alfred sighed again. "This is it, I guess."

Feliciano gulped and nodded, eyes staring straight ahead. "Yeah. Whatever happens next, happens."


	10. Chapter Ten: Tribulus

**Disclaimer: Dude. Buddy. My man. Guys. This is the last chapter. If you still don't understand that _Hetalia_ is owned by Hidekaz Himaruya, _Alice Isn't Dead_ is owned by Joseph Fink, and that I do not own nor claim to own either of them, we have a very serious problem.**

* * *

As the two of them sat in that truck, staring at the gate in front of them in apprehension, Feliciano and Alfred thought about very different things.

Feliciano thought about Italy. He wondered how his brother was doing, if he was happy with his boyfriend. Feliciano thought about all the art pieces left in the empty house, and wondered if anyone would ever notice that no one ever returned. Feliciano thought about the things he had brought with him to America, the ones left in the car back in the parking lot. He wondered if anyone ever found them, and if so, what happened to the car itself. Thoughts of Praxis Industries flashed through his mind, and he wondered if Caesar was able to leave the face of the earth peacefully, and if his coffin was still out there on the waves somewhere. Of course, Feliciano thought about Peter too. He hoped and prayed that Peter was safe- or, no, none of them were safe, Feliciano corrected himself. He hoped and prayed that Peter was alive.

Feliciano also thought about Alfred, obviously.

Alfred thought about Arthur. He wondered if Arthur's ghost was watching over him and Feliciano, wondered if he was screaming at them to turn back or if he was watching on in approving silence. Alfred thought about all the things that would still be in the same place if he ever got back to the house where he lived, and the Alfred briefly entertained the thought of not returning, even if he lived. Alfred took a few moments to think about Charlatan. The old man, was he still crossing the street? Was the mother still lovingly scolding her son as they exited room 204 of the Trade Winds Tiki Motel? Was that teenage girl still filling her white Ford with gas at the gas station? Alfred supposed that he would never really know. Alfred thought about that police station in Savannah, Georgia. He wondered if there were people searching for him and Feliciano at that very moment, ready to take them in and put them on trail and then into prison.

Alfred also thought about Feliciano, obviously.

And then they stopped thinking. Alfred's hands were shaking. Feliciano looked at the gate with its sign that said Tribulus. Around them was the vibration of the engine and the weight of the truck, all mass and potential energy.

Alfred touched his foot to the gas, not pushing down yet. He reached over into Feliciano's bag, passed Feliciano a bottle and kept one for himself, leaving one still in the bag. They did the one bit of preparation they had time to think about. A box of matches, the bottle, a bag, and a rubber sledgehammer, things that were hastily grabbed in the heat of the moment, lay at in the bag. Feliciano held onto the bag tightly. Both of them breathed a few times more. Felt the air go in and out, enjoying those moments in which it was still possible.

Their skin was damp now. Alfred thought of what he would do once they crashed through the gate, and his mind was a blank. They had no plan at all.

Feliciano took a deep breath. "Ti amo, Alfred."

Alfred nodded and swallowed. "Yeah. I love you too, Feliciano."

" _March 24, 9:07 PM,_ " the display read.

He hit the gas.

A sound like the yelp of an ancient creature, and the gate tore off and they rolled into town. There were so many of those men with their ill-fitting skin and yellow polo shirts. Hundreds, maybe. Alfred plowed through them, and they went flying, landing at horrible angles before Alfred had to brake to avoid crashing into the gas station. The explosion that would occur if he hadn't might have taken out a lot of them, but Alfred had to make sure he and Feliciano were alive to see this through, to make sure that none of the creatures were left when - or _if_ \- they left.

The mob surrounded the cab, sneering. One who had been hit limped towards Feliciano. The skin of his face had been torn off by the collision, and underneath was a mealy yellow fat, dripping down over his chin. There was no sign of bone.

Feliciano reached for Alfred's hand and gripped it tightly. He considered their next move. Alfred's entire body glistened. He couldn't smell the town, fortunately, but he could imagine a smell like tilled earth, like green things.

A whole glob of the yellow fat fell from the injured man's face and landed on the ground, where he slipped on it. He laughed. A choked, broken sound, similar to a drowning man.

All of the buildings in the town were covered in a thin film of oil, and the whole town looked sticky to the touch.

Feliciano let his eyes wander for the briefest of seconds, and he saw, tied to a streetlight near the gas station was one of them, like all the others. He leaned into the ropes that bound him.

"Get them!" he croaked. His whole body was covered in knife wounds, but his eyes were alive and focused. " _Get them!_ "

He bled mildew and must and globs of yellow fat into the ropes.

The crowd parted, and him - the original Him - the Thistle man, the Hungry Man, he walked stiffly up to the door of the cab.

"Oh, you can get out," he said. "None of us are going to hurt either of you right away. And you two aren't any safer in there."

He was right, Feliciano realized. Alfred opened the door. It took a couple tries because his hands were so slippery, but he made it, and he helped Feliciano out through the same door.

"Look at you two," the Tribulus man said, "sweating like two lost children exhausted from running around searching for their mothers."

"What a weird metaphor," Feliciano said.

"You're nervous," he commented.

"I'm always nervous," Alfred answered.

Feliciano wiped his forehead to keep his eyes clear.

"Welcome to my home," the Tribulus man said. "We didn't know you were coming, or we would have prepared better."

"What is the place?" Alfred asked. "Not that it matters. Not that it's anything but a wound that has to be sewn shut, but you know, the longer I keep talking, the longer before you attack us."

"That's a complicated story, and I'm not much for talking. Not like you. ' _Hi, Feliciano! Oh, Arthur! It's me again, Feliciano!_ '"

His voice was like the accidental hollowing of the wind.

The other Tribulus men had backed up, formed a circle around them, leaving the group of three alone in the center. Alfred and Feliciano were his mess to handle, and he was ready to clean them up.

"You're serial killers," Alfred said. His voice shook, but his tone was firm.

"We're _freedom_ ," the Tribulus man said. "Freedom can be good or bad. There can be terrible freedom." He grinned. His teeth were faintly green. "We _are_ the terrible freedom."

"You're murderers," Feliciano said. His voice shook too, but his tone was firm as well.

"America," the Tribulus Man said. "A country defined as much by distance as culture. America embraces its distances. Empty spaces and road trips, but there is always a price. We _are_ that price. We are creatures of the road. We feed on distance, on road trips, on emptiness, bodies by the side of the highway."

There was a sound, like applause, but softer. The crowd of Tribulus men sucking in and out on their cheeks, creating a faint sound of flesh.

"Don't try to make poetry out of the blood on your hands," Feliciano said.

He took Feliciano's arm. Alfred didn't know how he got that close, how he got between them, but he was there, and he did not grab; he _took_ , like a dance partner, gentle but insistent, and then he pushed Feliciano against the truck. His arm was against Feliciano's throat.

Fear branched through Alfred like lightning, starting from his gut and ending with the thunderclap in his head.

But Feliciano motioned him to stop. The Tribulus man couldn't do it. He couldn't push down, and he was wincing, his face wrinkling in disgust. He stepped back, wiping at his arm.

Feliciano grinned shakily, stepping forward from the truck and closer to Alfred. He gestured to his drenched face, neck, torso.

"Heather oil," he said. "Poured a bottle right over my head. Tip from a friend of ours."

The Tribulus man growled, and it sounded like a creature ten times his size. No human throat made that sound.

"You think that spell will protect you?" he said. "It will hurt me, but it will hurt you more." He slapped Feliciano. The world went white on one side, and his left ear rang.

Feliciano gasped, and Alfred didn't respond with words. Instead, he reached into Feliciano's bag and out at the Tribulus man before anyone could realize he was moving. Alfred grabbed his face, wrenched open his rotting, gummy mouth, and he shoved a huge fistful of dried heather into his mouth.

" _Fuck you!_ " Alfred yelled.

The Tribulus man choked and heaved. His skin turned an unholy shade of purple, as though his whole body was bruising, and Alfred glared at him as Feliciano recovered from the slap.

The Tribulus man turned and ran.

The other monsters around them froze. They didn't seem to know what to do. The tied up one, with a thick glop oozing from the wounds all over his skin, just moved his mouth like a fish, a faint sound like "ffuh… ffuh… ffuh."

Feliciano did the only thing he could do. In the moment that the monsters were frozen, he grabbed Alfred's hand and took off after the Tribulus man. The only way out was through.

As soon as the two started moving, the others moved too. Feliciano broke through a gap in their circle with Alfred right next to him, but they could hear the off kilter rhythm of their running, and the thick moist gasps of exertion from all around them

Feliciano just stayed with the Thistle man, just followed the Thistle man.

They chased him into a diner, the _Burgers & More_. The inside of the diner was full of rotting food. Milkshakes and hamburgers, covered in mold and maggots. Alfred was glad for the heather oil all over his face, but still the smell pursued him. Only the glasses of soda, watery with melted ice, still looked like what they were, unable to age, unable to rot.

The Tribulus man was already in the kitchen, headed for the back door, but Alfred saw an opportunity at the same time as Feliciano: the walk-in cooler.

Alfred put the last of his energy into a sprint, and crashed into him as he made for the back, sending both of them sprawling into the cooler. Feliciano ran in after them and slammed the door and pushed one of the low heavy shelves in front of it. The Tribulus man flopped around on the ground, spitting out heather, his skin still an angry purple.

After the heat of the night air outside, the walk in felt like constant pin pricks. It focused Alfred, like sobering up from a long night of drinking.

Alfred turned to check on Feliciano at the door, who was pressing his back against the shelf to keep the door shut, and when he turned back, the Tribulus man was on his feet.

"Well," he said. "Well, that bought you some time, didn't it? I wasn't expecting that. You got me to panic. Got me to run. But what now? What's next?"

His skin blotched back from purple to faint yellow. He stretched, and flexed, and Alfred could see his strength returning.

The walk-in was smaller than it had originally looked. Alfred could hear hands pawing on the outside of the door, and on the walls on both sides, and Feliciano's quiet swearing as he pushed back on the door.

"You got me to run, but then what? What weapon do you have to finish the job?" he said.

He spread his hands expectantly.

"Nothing," Alfred said honestly.

"Nothing?" he asked.

"I brought nothing. I brought myself, and Feliciano brought himself. I am going to kill you."

The Tribulus man laughed, the deep laugh at the end of a good joke.

"You're going to kill me? Hah!" He grinned. "Oh, Alfred. Let me explain death to you."

And then, he charged.

Alfred stood ready, ready to face him, but the Tribulus man went right to the left of him, and right towards Feliciano.

Alfred figured he'd never been more afraid. And that was saying a lot, after the year he'd had, after the things he'd seen. He felt terror in every part of him. It froze up his limbs, locked up his joints, made his thoughts both too slow for planning and too fast to follow. He wasn't a person anymore, just a container for his fear.

Alfred thought about Arthur, about when he found out he was dead.

He thought about Davie, dying alone as decent people ate waffles not ten feet away.

He thought about a father in a Target parking lot, calling the police under the belief that it would help.

He thought about a factory by the sea.

He thought about a line of names, a murderer's legacy on an ugly stretch of highway.

He thought about a young boy doing his best, and just how good his best was.

He thought about a bus pulling out of Victorville in the middle of the night.

He thought of home.

He thought of Peter.

He thought of Feliciano.

And through all of these thoughts, a buzzing anxiety. Anxiety like electricity. And he knew, in that moment, what Peter meant. Anxiety was just an energy. It was an uncontrollable near-infinite energy, surging within him. And for once, he stopped trying to contain it.

Feliciano saw the Tribulus man charging at him, and he felt his breath catch in his chest.

Alfred told his heart, _beat faster_ , Feliciano told his panicked breath, _become more difficult_ , and they told their fear to _overtake them_.

 _Make me more afraid. I am not afraid of feeling afraid. Make me more afraid!_

All of that energy, they turned it outward. They pushed it into their arms, their legs, their teeth.

 _Fuck the Tribulus man!_

When he hit Feliciano, he was stronger than Feliciano remembered. It was like being hit by a car. Mass without pity, just brutal physics, but Feliciano was moving too. He managed to procure the sledgehammer from his bag between the hits he suffered, and he hit back as hard as he could, pushed the Tribulus man as far back as he could, right to where Alfred was waiting.

Alfred staggered back, and the Tribulus man was heavier than he remembered. It was like having a heavy burden drag him down into the ocean as he tried to swim to the surface. Weight without mercy, only cruel reality, but Alfred took it as an advantage. As the Tribulus man quickly recovered and started hitting, Alfred was fighting too. Pounding at his face, his chest, biting, throwing his entire weight down onto him. He could faintly hear Feliciano breathing heavily as the shelf began to move a bit.

Alfred didn't feel pain. He was so full of fear that there wasn't room for anything else. He fought using every wave of terror inside of him.

The Tribulus man laughed when Alfred hit him, and he kept punching, as thoughtless and inhuman as a rock slide on a highway. But Alfred kept hitting too, and the Tribulus man stopped laughing. Alfred clawed at his face, and his skin started to go, and that yellow fat oozed out.

Feliciano sweat profusely as he leaned all of his weight against the shelf. He could feel the rough wooden edge dig into his skin, the edges cutting through and blood running down his arms. Feliciano could feel the bruises and welts forming from the Tribulus man's brief attack on him. More than anything else, Feliciano could feel the burning sensation in his muscles, the pure agony blazing through his body as his limbs shrieked in wretchedness. His blood pounded in his ears, and the force of the other creatures on the other side of the door only grew.

Through his hazy thoughts, he grabbed the sledgehammer again and fumbled for the matches, struggling to keep most of his weight on the shelf. He figured that if they broke through, and he survived being smashed against the wall like a bug, he would do his best to light the sledgehammer on fire and do what he could from there.

Behind him, the Tribulus man grunted, growled, flailed at Alfred. The Tribulus man was no longer toying with him, and he wanted to _destroy_ Alfred.

But Alfred stayed on his feet. He tore at him with the last of himself, and finally, the Tribulus man was the one that fell, his teeth mashed into his cheek, shouting incoherently.

Alfred went knees-first into his chest. He hit, and he hit… And then he was dead.

The Tribulus man was dead. He was _dead_.

Adrenaline pounded through Alfred. He couldn't turn off the energy he had found in himself, and he was in pretty bad shape. Bruises, probably a broken rib, definitely broken and chipped teeth. But the Thistle man laid there, his head a pile of fat and pulp that smelled like mushroom and had no bone.

Alfred through up. Half on the floor, and half on his body. It was horrible, but he felt victory like he hadn't in years. With his own hands, he had ended it. He had _fucking won!_

And then there was the sound of Feliciano letting out a quiet wail of anguish, and Alfred remembered that he had only killed one. They were surrounded by hundreds more.

" _Let us in! Let us in!_ " a ragged voice sang, every note in discord with the note before it.

Alfred crawled from his place on the Tribulus man, covered in lumps of grease and his own throw up, to join Feliciano in holding the door closed as well as they could, injured and depleted of strength as they were.

A skittering on the ceiling, like an enormous spider. Then the lights went out. In the darkness, Feliciano could hear only his and Alfred's breath mingling in the air in front of him, accompanied by the hissing and scratching from the walls. A voice he recognized as that of the stabbed creature, sounding like it was in his ear.

"Ffuh! Ffuh! Ffuh!"

Then a new sound. Feliciano felt it in his stomach first. A bass tone that hadn't been there before. Gradually it slid from his stomach to his ears, becoming audible. Engine. Many engines. The sound become clear. Car engines, and then gunshots.

The whispering stopped, and with it, the weight on the door. There was scrambling on the walls, like a dog slipping on hardwood, then nothing. Nothing but Feliciano and Alfred and the darkness of the walk-in.

Feliciano slowly let his arms slip away from the shelf, and pushed himself off of it. When no sudden push came, he grabbed a hold of the sledge hammer, touched Alfred lightly on the shoulder, and took a deep breath.

He was exhausted, but he could do it. One last push, he told himself.

"Hold your breath," he told Alfred.

He took the matches and lit one, touching it to the head of the sledgehammer, which set ablaze immediately, filling the air with what Feliciano guessed was the smell of singed rubber - he was holding his breath, after all.

Alfred let go as well and grabbed Feliciano's bag. He counted quietly to three, and shoved the shelf out of the way, jumping to his feet as the door rammed open to reveal a single Tribulus man in front of them, on the ground, wounded and twitching. One of his arm was twisted behind his body at an unnatural angle, and only a gaping hole was where the other used to be, oozing fat.

He lifted his head, and grinned at Alfred, moving to bite his foot.

Feliciano wasted no time in bringing the sledgehammer down on its body as hard as possible, and the creature let out a strangled and demonic screech, stopping just a centimeter away from Alfred, who had jumped backwards in shock. Feliciano raised the flaming sledgehammer and brought it down again, over and over. The flames traced the air as it repeatedly slammed down over the half-dead Tribulus man's body, burning the skin it touched.

Alfred jumped into action, and rummaged through Feliciano's bag for half a moment to procure the last bottle of heather oil. He dumped it on top of the still-moving sack of fat and skin, and jumped back as Feliciano dropped the flaming sledgehammer on top and ran.

The two stumbled in their race for the door of the abandoned building, but made it just as the dying howls of the Tribulus man faded.

They slammed the door open, and a rectangle of light with a figure just a few feet away made itself known. Gradually, Feliciano understood the shape as a woman holding a rifle. He'd never seen this woman before.

She looked pass them to the flaming corpse on the floor, and into the open walk-in freezer, where the original Tribulus man lay, dead.

"Holy shit!" she said.

She looked at Feliciano and Alfred again, closely, with something between awe and suspicion. She clicked on her radio. "You're not gonna believe this," she said, "but Vector H is down."

There was a general sound of disbelief and excitement from the radio, but she clicked it off before it could be understood as words.

"Come on out. Every last one of those things are being taken care of now." She gestured, but didn't touch Alfred or Feliciano. She seemed to want to give them distance.

Feliciano stepped out, and Alfred was right next to him. They reached for eachothers hands, and clasped them tightly, disregarding the vomit and fat and blood and other bodily fluids they were covered with.

The woman glanced again at the Tribulus man, the Hungry Man, the non-flaming corpse, and the flaming corpse. She gestured Alfred and Feliciano out of the rotting diner and out onto the streets. They were full of armored vehicles. Women and men in uniform sweeping the houses. Women and men in uniform shooting down the Tribulus men. Women and men in uniform guarding the gates and walls, making sure none of them escaped. Women and men burning the corpses.

But the uniforms did not look like any military Feliciano or Alfred knew. Navy blue jumpsuits, a white logo on the chest.

"Who are you all?" Feliciano asked the woman.

"You two did a very good thing today. A very good thing." She shook her head. "No, not a good thing. An _amazing_ thing. An indescribably incredible thing. But," she offered Alfred and Feliciano a friendly smile. "You're work is done. You can go home now."

Alfred felt dizzy. "Who do you work for?" he asked.

"Who do _you_ work for?" she said, and grinned. She was wearing one of the jumpsuits too. Alfred looked at the logo more closely.

A white penrose triangle. Bay & Creek Shipping. The same logo as the door of Alfred's cab, the same penrose triangle as the brooch on his shirt.

" _What?_ " Alfred asked. It was the only thing he could think to say, so he said it again. " _What?_ "

The woman laughed and led him and Feliciano towards a vehicle. Not a truck, a van. Navy blue with a white penrose on the door.

"You're lucky that you chose today to act," she said conversationally as she helped the two into the backseat. "March twenty-fourth. How'd you know?"

Feliciano looked at Alfred in confusion, and Alfred looked right back at him. "March twenty-fourth?"

"Yeah!" the woman said from the front seat. "I'm gonna drive you back to headquarters for now, but we've been planning this for almost years. Had our best, Arthur Kirkland, working on it for a while."

Feliciano's eyes widened, and Alfred just stared.

Then, he laughed. "Oh." He laughed again, even harder. "Son of a bitch!"

Feliciano watched him in confusion, and the woman in the front seat watched him curiously through the mirror as she started up the engine.

"Alfred?" Feliciano said, mildly concerned. "Alfred, what's going on?"

Alfred grinned. "Arthur. When I was going through his crap, the three things I saw the most of was 'The California Project', 'Vector H', and the date, '03/24'."

"You knew Arthur Kirkland?" the woman in the front seat asked, but she was ignored.

Feliciano felt numb. Alfred grinned at him in exhaustion and amusement.

"We are the two luckiest people on this earth right now," Feliciano said.

"Yeah," Alfred said, smiling. "Yeah, we are."

Feliciano burst out laughing, and Alfred joined in again. Tears streamed from both of their eyes, and they held onto each other with trembling bodies and trembling limbs, and they laughed and cried until they only shook, no noise coming out.

The woman in the front smiled. "You two sure went through hell and back, huh?"

Alfred felt more tears leak out from his eyes, and he put his hand on Feliciano's cheek, brushing away tears he saw coming out again there.

"God," Alfred said. "You have no idea."

Feliciano reached up and put his hand on top of Alfred's and leaned in, pressing their foreheads together.

"Alfred," Feliciano whispered. "Alfred, we can go home now."

Alfred laughed. "Yeah. We're going home, Feli."

Feliciano took a deep breath and smiled softly. "Home. And no more road trips for a long, long time. No trucks ever again."

Alfred smiled.

"When we move out of the old house, let's make pizza together."


End file.
